5 ms·

Google certainly does a lot of security in house.

bhedgeoser 5y ago
It also stores passwords in plain text. I once got an email from them sayingthat their crawlers found my password somewhere online.
- hasty 5y ago
  That doesn't mean it's stored in plain text. They could be storing a nice hash, and then when the crawler finds your email and password on some site some where, it could try to hash it as if you were logging in and see if it matches.
  - jart 5y ago
    Do you know how computationally expensive it is to hash passwords?
    - hasty 5y ago
      It's computationally expensive to hash every single possible password, but given a proposed login/password combo, it's not expensive to check just the one. If Google, in crawling, finds a dump of several million accounts and their purported passwords, it's not a heavy lift to check each password.
  - ummonk 5y ago
    Salting (which they absolutely should be doing precisely to make mass dictionary attacks computationally expensive) would make that infeasible. More likely they're just checking against the stolen passwords database whenever the user logs in, as passwords are typically submitted in plain text.
    - hasty 5y ago
      Salting doesn't matter in this case. They're not finding a list of free-floating passwords and then seeing if anyone has that password; they're finding a list of accounts and associated passwords. So they only have to check that particular combination, just as they would for a regular login.
      - ummonk 5y ago
        D’oh you’re right.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  That conclusion doesn't necessarily follow, fwiw. If you find a password list, then you hash all the passwords and see if any match the hashes you store, now you know if the password found online belonged to someone on your system but at no point did you keep your own system password in plaintext. Mind you with salt and pepper (roughly, ways to modify the hash and overcome rainbow tables) checking anything other than the very highest frequency passwords found would seem onerous.
  - ummonk 5y ago
    They're probably just checking against a stolen passwords list when the user logs in.

It also stores passwords in plain text. I once got an email from them sayingthat their crawlers found my password somewhere online.

hasty 5y ago
That doesn't mean it's stored in plain text. They could be storing a nice hash, and then when the crawler finds your email and password on some site some where, it could try to hash it as if you were logging in and see if it matches.
- jart 5y ago
  Do you know how computationally expensive it is to hash passwords?
  - hasty 5y ago
    It's computationally expensive to hash every single possible password, but given a proposed login/password combo, it's not expensive to check just the one. If Google, in crawling, finds a dump of several million accounts and their purported passwords, it's not a heavy lift to check each password.
- ummonk 5y ago
  Salting (which they absolutely should be doing precisely to make mass dictionary attacks computationally expensive) would make that infeasible. More likely they're just checking against the stolen passwords database whenever the user logs in, as passwords are typically submitted in plain text.
  - hasty 5y ago
    Salting doesn't matter in this case. They're not finding a list of free-floating passwords and then seeing if anyone has that password; they're finding a list of accounts and associated passwords. So they only have to check that particular combination, just as they would for a regular login.
    - ummonk 5y ago
      D’oh you’re right.
pbhjpbhj 5y ago
That conclusion doesn't necessarily follow, fwiw. If you find a password list, then you hash all the passwords and see if any match the hashes you store, now you know if the password found online belonged to someone on your system but at no point did you keep your own system password in plaintext. Mind you with salt and pepper (roughly, ways to modify the hash and overcome rainbow tables) checking anything other than the very highest frequency passwords found would seem onerous.
- ummonk 5y ago
  They're probably just checking against a stolen passwords list when the user logs in.