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I disagree that not being able to tell someone their password is a usability problem. Having a password reset system is just as usable and significantly more s
by drm237 18y ago
I disagree that not being able to tell someone their password is a usability problem. Having a password reset system is just as usable and significantly more secure than having to store passwords in plain text.
And both of your arguments about having bigger problems are fundamentally flawed. Sure, if someone does get your db, you have a big problem, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't take precautions so that if it somehow happens they can't read it like a book. It's kind of like you're saying cars shouldn't have airbags because it's harder to honk the horn and if you do get in an accident, you've got bigger problems.
And someone snooping on your email is as easy as you accessing your webmail on an unencrypted wifi connection. Do you think everyone in the world makes sure they use the ssl version of their webmail in public? Because if not, sniffing packets is trivially easy.
My point is that the situations you mentioned only become bigger problems when you make no effort to protect these things.
- wallflower 18y ago> Do you think everyone in the world makes sure they use the ssl version of their webmail in public? I know techies who don't use GMail who don't bother to explicitly using https://mail.google.com https://mail.google.com - I don't know why.
- paulgb 18y agoI didn't realize until recently, but GMail now has an option to automatically use https. It is under https://mail.google.com/mail/#settings https://mail.google.com/mail/#settings at the bottom, and is turned off by default.
- timf 18y agoAnd there was an automated tool released last year to mess with those who don't do that: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=https+gmail+cookie+hijacking http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=https+gmail+cookie+...
- agotterer 18y agoI prefer 1 way hashed passwords. But why assume they are doing it in plain text? Why not a two way encryption?
- drm237 18y agoTrue, two way hashing is better than nothing, but it's still less secure than one way hashing (with a per-user salt) for passwords. All you need if one rogue employee and they can decrypt everyone's password. It's just difficult to justify the added risk when there usually isn't a need to retrieve the original password. Edit: by "two way hashing" I meant encryption, not hashing. not sure where my brain was on that one...
- tptacek 18y agoAs a practitioner in this space, I'm going to tell you that I don't know what this "two-way hashing" is that you speak of. There's a right way to store passwords and there's a wrong way. The right way is bcrypt. The wrong way is anything other than bcrypt.
- thwarted 18y agoAre you making a distinction between storing for verification and storing for use? The right way to store passwords when you use them to verify authentication is to hash (twitter verifying a login). The right way to store passwords when you need to use them to gain access on behalf of a user is to encrypt them (any third party "twitter application"). I ask because the first google result for "bcrypt" is http://bcrypt.sourceforge.net/ http://bcrypt.sourceforge.net/ which is distinctly not hashing, where as the second one is for a ruby library interface to bcrypt hashing.
- tptacek 18y agoFirst, bcrypt is a one-way hash algorithm. Second, the whole fuss about Twitter and OAuth is the degree to which people are not OK with giving their passwords to other people to use.