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GCHQ – Not So Secure?
- jgrahamc 14y agoThis is just GCHQ's way of saying that they already know how to reverse bcrypt. On a more serious note http://www.gchq-careers.co.uk http://www.gchq-careers.co.uk does not appear to be run by GCHQ. The Terms page says that it's run by TMP Worldwide (http://www.gchq-careers.co.uk/terms-and-conditions/ http://www.gchq-careers.co.uk/terms-and-conditions/).
- scoot 14y agoThat doesn't make it any less egregious. GCHQ (of all organisations!) have failed to carry out even a minimum standard of due diligence in selecting a supplier that handles sensitive personal information of prospective employees.
- Ntrails 14y agoThe real question is why anyone would sign up to such things using a "real" password. I've lost count of the number of jobsites and so on that I registered for with a random string knowing that a) Firefox would remember it and b) On the off chance it doesn't, and I get through to a stage where I ever need the password I can just recover/reset Signing up for websites that have limited/no repeat value is part of everyday life and I don't have high expectations of them
- jiggy2011 14y agoThey have finite resources so there is an opportunity cost to everything. More time auditing their public website means less time auditing military systems etc.
- jiggy2011 14y agoMaybe it's on purpose and it's question #1 of the interview, "what did you think of our recruitment website?"
- acdha 14y ago“We took the liberty of trying your email and password on some popular websites and have rejected your application”
- keithpeter 14y ago"This is just GCHQ's way of saying that they already know how to reverse bcrypt." That comment made my morning. Surely this is a case of http://xkcd.com/932/ http://xkcd.com/932/ Embarrassing but surely those nice people in Cheltenham are about more serious work.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- redmattred 14y agoThis is a microsite run by TMP. Since most Applicant Tracking Systems (the software used to list/fill jobs) do not list jobs in an SEO friendly way, companies like Jobs2Web, Optijob, and TMP built microsite products like the one being used here by the GCHQ. TMP is an ad agency, not a technology company - can't say I'm too surprised they missed the ball on this one. There are lots of US gov't agencies who use TMP also.
- blhack 14y agoBecause you mentioned bcrypt, it might be a good time for everybody to read this: http://yorickpeterse.com/articles/use-bcrypt-fool/ http://yorickpeterse.com/articles/use-bcrypt-fool/ (sidenote: GCHQ cannot reverse bcrypt. Jgrahamc was making a joke.)
- tryeng 14y agoThat's not a good article to make people read. I find it strange that it doesn't mention lack of salting among the most common mistakes. Also, I didn't think SHA1 broken in any way that makes breaking password hashes easier than e.g. the SHA2 family? I might be wrong, though. PS: I'm not advocating using anything other than a good PBKDF for hashing passwords.) Edit: Re-reading the article it seems like lots of BS in there: Example 1, regarding hashing something several times: "In order to retrieve the original password a hacker has to crack multiple hashes instead of only one." Nah, guessing is only more time-consuming. Example 2, regarding the same thing: "The first reason is pretty easy to bust: simply add more hardware (or better hardware) and you're good to go." This applies for bcrypt as well. And for his "attack" on "Hashing a password N times in the form of hash( hash(password) ) * N" you would need a working preimage attack for the hashing function used. EditN: Rewrite
- jiggy2011 14y agoBcrypt has a tuneable "cost function", so you get to decide how hard to make it. It's effectively designed to be slow and hard to do in parallel. The SHA family on the other hand are designed to be fast, (for checksums etc) so it's possible that later SHA algorithms are actually worse than earlier ones for password hashing. Modern computers can do a lot of MD5/SHA1 every second so even with a salt, one round of SHA1 is likely to be not very good at all. You can probably find a significantly large X and do SHA1 enough times to make it slow enough today, but for future-proofing you are better off just using an algorithm that is actually designed for such purposes.
- tryeng 14y agoI'm not saying that that bcrypt isn't a better choice, it is, but some of the "flaws" he is pointing out in that article are just ridiculous. If he's going to argue for something, he should be using correct arguments.
- gambiting 14y agoHMRC does not accept passwords with special characters, so it only shows that these sites are run by incompetent IT departments....
- bapbap 14y agoOutsourced to companies like Capgemini who deliver as little as they can get away with
- jiggy2011 14y agoTo be fair, I doubt that the GCHQ website is developed by the same people who are doing cyber intelligence work or whatever it is they do. More likely it was just developed by whichever company was picked off a list of government contractors. I'm sure that whatever internal systems they have are completely separate from the website. GCHQ probably consider arguing with a contractor about the password hashing on the jobs section of their website as a waste of their time.
- richardwhiuk 14y agoIt's not obvious that they are storing them in plain text (they could easily be encrypting them), but what they aren't doing is using a one way hash.
- pfortuny 14y agoYou are right but I had rather they stored the passwords in cleartext than send them over e-mail to the users (because then the e-mail provider has a copy of the password)... Being able to automatically reproduce them is almost equivalent to storing them in cleartext.
- 3825 14y agoNot if we reuse the password or if you're important enough, a pattern they might recognize
- lucian1900 14y agoThat doesn't really make it any better. If someone gets their database, they almost certainly also have the key they hypothetically encrypted the passwords with. If they'd used pbkdf/bcrypt or even better, scrypt, this would be a non-issue.
- buttscicles 14y agoI'm curious - what makes scrypt superior to bcrypt?
- lucian1900 14y agoIn addition to being time-hard (like pbkdf2 and bcrypt), it is also space-hard.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoThe space-hard is important for people throwing 10000 GPU cores at the problem. Bcrypt is more susceptible as it was designed before the million-core world came about; scrypt will continue to thwart due to memory constraints.
- shanelja 14y agohttp://www.ucas.ac.uk/ http://www.ucas.ac.uk/ Another website which stores passwords in cleartext - just raising awareness. We have received a reminder request for your login details. Please use the details exactly as written below to access the UCAS Apply 2013 service: Password: ThisWasMyClearTextPassword
- karma_fountain 14y agoIt was a while before they even had password reset. I believe you had to ring up. Think this will be fixed next year.
- shanelja 14y agoI forgot my username, because they don't allow email address login, so I had to recover my username, for this they required some kind of ID, but it wasn't present in my emails, it took me a while to figure out there were different recovery pages for different types of accounts, so putting in my email just returned "invalid email address". Took me about 45 minutes just to recover my information, it's a terrible user experience: First off, requiring an uppercase letter, which I've never used, so I actually now need to remember another, both lowercasepassword and Uppercasepassword, then changing my username to something built out of my name and age, with capitals in them, like FirstLast92, instead of just my email. I hope I never have to use this website again.
- Shish2k 14y ago> both lowercasepassword and Uppercasepassword When I was applying to uni both of those would be invalid passwords too, as they're more than 8 characters. I emailed them to complain, and was told that this is to enforce easy-to-remember passwords, because they didn't want to deal with the hassle of people asking for password resets...
- ajanuary 14y agoThe University of York have a similar length requirement. When I enquired about it, I was told it was because some of the older systems have a maximum length, and they keep your password the same everywhere.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Major_Grooves 14y agobut it's not a lie then. As you say yourself the HR part of their website stores plaintext passwords.
- deanpcmad 14y agoJust because it was sent by email, doesn't mean they aren't encrypting passwords. When the password is sent to their servers it's unencrypted anyway so can be read and sent in an email. I do disagree with passwords being sent by email though
- nobodyshere 14y agoNow try thinking about what you've just said, please.
- strangestchild 14y agoI think the point is that storing even encrypted passwords is not as safe as storing (salted) hashes, because if the database was compromised, the encryption key would likely be compromised as well. It's safer if even the site themselves do not know your password. Technically, you are right to say that there's no evidence passwords are being stored in plaintext, but encrypted stores really aren't any better.
- martinced 14y agoNobody accused them of "not encrypting" [sic] passwords. People accused them of storing passwords in clear text. These are two entirely different things. Why? Because passwords should NEVER be encrypted. Passwords are meant to be hashed (with a salt) and the hash (+salt) is what should be stored on their servers. You really should know better...
- ed_blackburn 14y agoJust highlights how the race to the bottom in terms of IT procurement in govt. is arguably counter productive. Compare the cumbersome government procurement process for knocking up simple websites like this when they could palm them off to any number of small competent London tech companies. Most of these things could just be pithy rails site that get thrown away after every recruitment campaign.
- CurtMonash 14y agoThe argument that this matters holds water. If you can steal the identities of all the applicants then, in particular, you can steal the identities of the successful ones.
- objclxt 14y agoGCHQ, along with various other agencies, out-source some of their recruitment, mainly to sift. Perhaps you could steal the identities of the candidates who had passed the initial few sifts...but I really doubt that things like developed vetting status are going through this system.
- hp50g 14y agoNope - having been there as a contractor, it's still done on paper believe it or not.
- walshemj 14y agoYou know that these recruitment sites are run at arms length by a specialist recruitment agency and not GCHQ its self. Though it doesn't send out the right signals as a list of potential candidates for GCHQ, The SS and SIS does have inteligence value to other actors
- rpledge 14y agoClearly they're actually storing them using very strong hashing techniques but then using super secret technology from MI6 to reverse them if they get forgotten.
- DanBC 14y agoNo no, that's back to front. GCHQ develop the super secret technologies and do all the listening and decrypting. MI6 uses that intelligence (as well as intelligence they've gathered themselves). MI6's "super secret technology" is a rubber hose in some friendly country with no human rights laws.
- JonnieCache 14y agoThis is a big deal when you consider that, IIRC, GCHQ instructs you not to tell anyone you've applied, and admitting that you've talked to others about your candidacy can disqualify you from the job. But perhaps I'm remembering a different intelligence agency's policy.
- objclxt 14y agoNo, that's true across all of the UK intelligence agencies (probably all agencies worldwide, really). Depending on the role you'll probably have to go through developed vetting, at which point your passwords are the least of your worries...
- shocks 14y agoI encountered this over a year ago. Shocking really.
- DoubleMalt 14y agoI love how they strongly advise against writing down the password after sending it in plain text over (possibly unencrypted) email.
- largesse 14y agoIs there some checklist some place that can be used to beat people over the head with the very basics of security for a user-facing site? Sort of, "If your developers are doing this today, they are grossly incompetent and you are putting your business and customers at risk."
- trotsky 14y agoIf you're reusing passwords on websites you care about your behavior is risky no matter what hasing algorithm gets used or doesn't at some specific website. If you're not reusing passwords it doesn't matter to you how they store your password. If they have broken in far enough to dump the auth table they almost inevitably can access your data stored there.
- ratherbefuddled 14y agoThis is what happens when you let HR buy software without adult supervision.
- ollybee 14y agoOfficial UK public transport site also does this http://www.transportdirect.info http://www.transportdirect.info There is a site for naming and shaming plaintextoffenders.com
- belorn 14y agoThere exist a few cases where storing passwords in clear text is valid, but this one isn't it. Ask the question: Is the cost of giving the user a new generated password higher than the risk averted by storing the password hashed. If all you have is a login for a website, then the risk is clearly bigger than any cost.
- buttscicles 14y ago>There exist a few cases where storing passwords in clear text is valid, but this one isn't it. Name one.
- fatjonny 14y agoI think there are some cases when storing passwords in clear text is valid. One example: A website has educational content. Teachers can sign up students in their classrooms. The teacher's password is stored securely, the student's password is not. The student password is shorter and automatically generated. The goal is to make the password just hard enough to not be guessed by other students, but not so hard that the student can't remember it. It is stored in clear text so that the teacher can look it up for the student, or print out the password to pass out to the student, etc. The student account is only given access to the content. The worst thing that happens if a student's password is guessed is that another student can mess up their progress tracking. Is there a reason the student passwords should be encrypted in the database?
- koenigdavidmj 14y agoAll of those can be solved by password reset (perhaps by permission of the teacher account, in this case, rather than entering personal information, as password resets usually work).
- fatjonny 14y agoSure, teachers could reset the password. My point is that there is no reason to. It is one extra step for teachers and gets rid of the benefit of having a consistent password for the student.
- martin_ 14y ago509 - Bandwidth Limit Exceeded ... The power of HN!
- umsm 14y agoCached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://danfarrall.com/gchq/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
- dfarrall 14y agoJust had to upgrade my bandwidth for the views your bringing. Some interesting comments here guys.