5 ms·

> That renders even the most secure password vulnerable to compute-intensive brute force No it doesn't. My passwords are 30-character randomly generated and lo

by rorrr 14y ago

> That renders even the most secure password vulnerable to compute-intensive brute force No it doesn't. My passwords are 30-character randomly generated and look like this: T7PN2m7Yju43IWtoBkwL6TLx18Rdyq Do you want to guess how long it will take to bruteforce with that "monster"? (26 + 26 + 10)^30 = 5.91 × 10^53 possible combinations At 348 billion guesses per second it will take 1.53 × 10^42 seconds or 4.84 × 10^34 years That's quite a bit longer than the age of the universe.

alexkus 14y ago
True, but in reality you're probably sending that password over something less secure (like an SSL connection) that doesn't require quite as long (but still a very long time) to crack. Anything is only as secure as the weakest link in the chain. If (I'm sure you don't) you allow your browser to save that password so that you don't have to enter it every time then you just need one cleverly designed trojan to be run on your machine (probably easier to do than waiting 4.84E34 years to crack a password) to grab the saved passwords cache from your browser and it's no longer secret.
- raverbashing 14y ago
  There you go 30 chars password don't matter. Sure, it's not low hanging fruit, but it's not troublesome if you're the target Why? Weakness 1: Because it's written down somewhere. Weakness 2..n: weaker links in the chain
  - DanBC 14y ago
    > Weakness 1: Because it's written down somewhere. This should be part of your risk assessment. For most people and most passwords the risk is not someone riffling through your wallet to find the card with your 30 character password. The risk is from criminal gangs hacking a system and downloading a huge database of usernames / password hashes, and then performing an offline attack on those hashes. For most people writing a good password down and keeping the password safely is better than using a weak password.
    - raverbashing 14y ago
      True That´s why I use a 'throwaway' password for most unimportant accounts. Sure, may be easy to break, but it isn't logging in to my gmail. Don't forget also the risk of getting locked out of your account.
      - bigiain 14y ago
        I fell victim to that once, when I hadn't "upgraded" the re-used throwaway password I'd used to register to see what some random website was. When my throwaway password got exposed (in cleartext facepalm!) by PerlMonks, within a day or so someone had used it to send Acai Berry spam through my Twitter account (which 'd completely forgotten was still using a shared/throwaway password even though it had turned from "some random new website I was curious about" into "somewhere where I actually care about my online reputation"). Just don't re-used passwords _anywhere_ - choose a password generation/storage solution that works across all your devices, and use it to generate unique strong passwords for everything. (1PassWord + DropBox works great for me across my MacOSX, iOS, Android, and Windows devices - I occasionally would like it on Linux too, but rarely enough that I'm satisfied to use my phone and re-type passwords in Linux)
        takluyver 14y ago
        If Linux support is more important, LastPass works very nicely. Although using it on mobile devices is a 'premium' feature, at $1 per month.
        raverbashing 14y ago
        Interesting. It is certainly needed to "upgrade" passwords sometimes. My beef with 1PW is that it's a single point of failure, not to mention inconvenience/risks. For example, what if I need to check gmail in a trusted, but borrowed device. The main issue I think is that using only one password for security is insufficient (but not necessarily go for a 2-factor auth)
        bigiain 14y ago
  - rorrr 14y ago
    I store my passwords in KeePass, protected by one long password stored in my head.
- rorrr 14y ago
  > The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued a statement that says SSL certificates with a key length of 1,024 bits or fewer will be insufficient for security after December 31, 2010 > It is recommended that the algorithms and key sizes in the "Through 2030" row (e.g., 2048-bit RSA) should be used to provide the cryptographic protection http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-57/sp800-57-Part1-revised2_Mar08-2007.pdf http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-57/sp800-57-P... 1024 bit is impossible to bruteforce. Simply incrementing an integer 2^1024 times will take more energy than our whole universe has. Heck, even 128 bit would take 3.1×10^19 years to bruteforce with that GPU setup. My citibank.com uses a 256-bit connection. SSL is not "less secure" than my 30-character password (correction: 128-bit one is a bit less secure, but 256-bit one is much more secure). If it were, all the banks would be freaking out and would shut down their web interfaces.
  - lucian1900 14y ago
    I think the suggestion of SSL being less secure was based on it possibly having some vulnerability or other (which, historically, has happened), not necessarily having to brute force it. Hashes don't tend to have side-channel attacks.
  - agl 14y ago
    RSA keys are composite numbers. Bruteforcing them involves factoring, not trying 2^n possibilities. A bruteforce of a 1024-bit RSA key possible to be published this decade and likely by 2030. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_number_field_sieve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_number_field_sieve
- DanBC 14y ago
  Yes, there might be other attacks on the password, but rorr is responding directly to part of the article which claims > Gosney’s system elevates password cracking to the next level, and effectively renders even the strongest passwords* protected with weaker encryption algorithms, like Microsoft’s LM and NTLM, obsolete.
nemo1618 14y ago
Such passwords are certainly secure, but it's a pain to have to carry Keepass/other programs around when using other computers. I think I've found a happy medium by memorizing a simple password-generation function in my scripting language of choice. It produces sufficiently strong passwords, and if you're stranded without Keepass you can still generate them using a local interpreter or a site like codepad.org.
- wcoenen 14y ago
  This doesn't work because there are conflicting rules out there about what a password should look like. Less than X chars, more than X chars, must contain certain chars, must'n contain certain chars... I use KeePass, with a copy (via dropbox) on my smartphone for when I'm not at my own computer.
  - tux1968 14y ago
    My bank actually limits passwords to a maximum of 10 characters. Drives me bonkers because it prohibits my normal use of the Stanford PwdHash. Many other sites have "helpful" rules that get in the way as well. Frustrating.
- bigiain 14y ago
  If you can sync your password safe aoftware to your phone, that pretty much solves that problem, at least for me. (I also rely on having one of my phones or my iPad with me anytime I need secure access to any account of mine, 'cause I use two factor auth using TOTP tokens for places that support it like Google, Amazon, and Dropbox)

by rorrr 14y ago

alexkus 14y ago

True, but in reality you're probably sending that password over something less secure (like an SSL connection) that doesn't require quite as long (but still a very long time) to crack. Anything is only as secure as the weakest link in the chain. If (I'm sure you don't) you allow your browser to save that password so that you don't have to enter it every time then you just need one cleverly designed trojan to be run on your machine (probably easier to do than waiting 4.84E34 years to crack a password) to grab the saved passwords cache from your browser and it's no longer secret.

raverbashing 14y ago
There you go 30 chars password don't matter. Sure, it's not low hanging fruit, but it's not troublesome if you're the target Why? Weakness 1: Because it's written down somewhere. Weakness 2..n: weaker links in the chain
- DanBC 14y ago
  > Weakness 1: Because it's written down somewhere. This should be part of your risk assessment. For most people and most passwords the risk is not someone riffling through your wallet to find the card with your 30 character password. The risk is from criminal gangs hacking a system and downloading a huge database of usernames / password hashes, and then performing an offline attack on those hashes. For most people writing a good password down and keeping the password safely is better than using a weak password.
  - raverbashing 14y ago
    True That´s why I use a 'throwaway' password for most unimportant accounts. Sure, may be easy to break, but it isn't logging in to my gmail. Don't forget also the risk of getting locked out of your account.
    - bigiain 14y ago
      I fell victim to that once, when I hadn't "upgraded" the re-used throwaway password I'd used to register to see what some random website was. When my throwaway password got exposed (in cleartext facepalm!) by PerlMonks, within a day or so someone had used it to send Acai Berry spam through my Twitter account (which 'd completely forgotten was still using a shared/throwaway password even though it had turned from "some random new website I was curious about" into "somewhere where I actually care about my online reputation"). Just don't re-used passwords _anywhere_ - choose a password generation/storage solution that works across all your devices, and use it to generate unique strong passwords for everything. (1PassWord + DropBox works great for me across my MacOSX, iOS, Android, and Windows devices - I occasionally would like it on Linux too, but rarely enough that I'm satisfied to use my phone and re-type passwords in Linux)
      - takluyver 14y ago
        If Linux support is more important, LastPass works very nicely. Although using it on mobile devices is a 'premium' feature, at $1 per month.
      - raverbashing 14y ago
        Interesting. It is certainly needed to "upgrade" passwords sometimes. My beef with 1PW is that it's a single point of failure, not to mention inconvenience/risks. For example, what if I need to check gmail in a trusted, but borrowed device. The main issue I think is that using only one password for security is insufficient (but not necessarily go for a 2-factor auth)
        bigiain 14y ago
- rorrr 14y ago
  I store my passwords in KeePass, protected by one long password stored in my head.
rorrr 14y ago
> The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued a statement that says SSL certificates with a key length of 1,024 bits or fewer will be insufficient for security after December 31, 2010 > It is recommended that the algorithms and key sizes in the "Through 2030" row (e.g., 2048-bit RSA) should be used to provide the cryptographic protection http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-57/sp800-57-Part1-revised2_Mar08-2007.pdf http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-57/sp800-57-P... 1024 bit is impossible to bruteforce. Simply incrementing an integer 2^1024 times will take more energy than our whole universe has. Heck, even 128 bit would take 3.1×10^19 years to bruteforce with that GPU setup. My citibank.com uses a 256-bit connection. SSL is not "less secure" than my 30-character password (correction: 128-bit one is a bit less secure, but 256-bit one is much more secure). If it were, all the banks would be freaking out and would shut down their web interfaces.
- lucian1900 14y ago
  I think the suggestion of SSL being less secure was based on it possibly having some vulnerability or other (which, historically, has happened), not necessarily having to brute force it. Hashes don't tend to have side-channel attacks.
- agl 14y ago
  RSA keys are composite numbers. Bruteforcing them involves factoring, not trying 2^n possibilities. A bruteforce of a 1024-bit RSA key possible to be published this decade and likely by 2030. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_number_field_sieve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_number_field_sieve
DanBC 14y ago
Yes, there might be other attacks on the password, but rorr is responding directly to part of the article which claims > Gosney’s system elevates password cracking to the next level, and effectively renders even the strongest passwords* protected with weaker encryption algorithms, like Microsoft’s LM and NTLM, obsolete.

nemo1618 14y ago

Such passwords are certainly secure, but it's a pain to have to carry Keepass/other programs around when using other computers. I think I've found a happy medium by memorizing a simple password-generation function in my scripting language of choice. It produces sufficiently strong passwords, and if you're stranded without Keepass you can still generate them using a local interpreter or a site like codepad.org.

wcoenen 14y ago
This doesn't work because there are conflicting rules out there about what a password should look like. Less than X chars, more than X chars, must contain certain chars, must'n contain certain chars... I use KeePass, with a copy (via dropbox) on my smartphone for when I'm not at my own computer.
- tux1968 14y ago
  My bank actually limits passwords to a maximum of 10 characters. Drives me bonkers because it prohibits my normal use of the Stanford PwdHash. Many other sites have "helpful" rules that get in the way as well. Frustrating.
bigiain 14y ago
If you can sync your password safe aoftware to your phone, that pretty much solves that problem, at least for me. (I also rely on having one of my phones or my iPad with me anytime I need secure access to any account of mine, 'cause I use two factor auth using TOTP tokens for places that support it like Google, Amazon, and Dropbox)