5 ms·
> In some cases, we may require you to change your password. (For example, if it’s commonly used or hasn’t been changed in a long time) This is ambiguous...by
by mattlong 14y ago
> In some cases, we may require you to change your password. (For example, if it’s commonly used or hasn’t been changed in a long time)
This is ambiguous...by "commonly used" do they mean 1) I'm logging in with my password frequently or 2) my password itself is a commonly used password? I'm assuming (and praying!) they mean the former since the latter would mean they're storing my password in plaintext.
UPDATE: Dropbox doesn't store in plaintext. I was incorrect to assume these were the only two possibilities. Confer child comments.
- mnutt 14y agoThey wouldn't have to store your password in plaintext to determine that. They could just hash commonly used passwords and compare the hashes to yours.
- wizardishungry 14y agoIf the number of salts used in the system is equal to the number of users, this could be expensive.
- jarito 14y agoThey will just check your password against a list of 'bad' passwords when you log in. No need to brute force the stored hash.
- wizardishungry 14y agoObviously that would work, but not if you're using Challenge-response authentication. In general, I don't think people bother with now that when using https.
- wizardishungry 14y agoA little bit of googling makes it seem like auth tokens are not sent it plaintext over HTTPS but are authenticated using challenge response – http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=47952 http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=47952 The WWW site may differ.
- tedunangst 14y agoAssuming they use straight up salted sha256, my five year old core2 laptop does at least 10,000 per second, per core. They could check every user for the top 10k passwords for a few hundred bucks of EC2 time.
- xentronium 14y agoWhy do you assume that?
- shizcakes 14y agoIt wouldn't, necessarily -- I thought about this a little, and there are ways to identify commonly used passwords without storing them in plain text. They could check passwords on login (before salting/hashing) against a blacklist of 'commonly used passwords'. This is probably the most secure method, as it only implies that users passwords are not on the blacklist, but does not imply plain text storage or unsalted hashes. If they were not salting their hashes, then they could query their database for hashes that match the hashed version of commonly used passwords. Similar to the blacklist above, but implies that the passwords are stored unsalted, which is sad.
- rpearl 14y agoDropboxer here. We do not store passwords in plaintext, or unsalted. End sentence. :)
- bonzoesc 14y agoHow do you store them?
- timdorr 14y agoI believe the implication is that they are stored hashed and salted.
- agwa 14y agoThere are many different ways to salt and hash, some more secure than others (bcrypt and DES crypt() being two examples with vastly different levels of security).
- skeletonjelly 14y agoWith regards to security, I'd rather not read into subtext. Hopefully they can provide a definitive answer.
- spqr 14y agoMind telling us why we got the email? Since I never used the same password twice your official explanation is bullshit. It's looking more like you have no idea what someone did on your network so you just blasted out a mass email and forced people to change their password.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoIt's quite obvious from context that it's the latter. However, there is zero implication that they are storing passwords in plaintext. There are several ways to implement such a feature. First, the password could be checked on login when it is sent in plaintext but not stored. Second, they could run an offline dictionary attack against the hashed password database.
- pdkp 14y agoGiven they state that some accounts were compromised by stolen passwords from "other websites," it would make sense to run some sort of dictionary attack using lists from those sites.