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Can Snowden be targeted using the Adobe breach?
- GoldfishCRM 13y agoSo Edvard has the same password as 206 other people and you can get there email adresses. It should not be that hard to get the password.
- VMG 13y agoAh yes, the beloved security question.
- VMG 13y agoAh yes, the beloved security question.
- MattBearman 13y agoMildly off topic but: I've never been a fan of password hints, but I'll admit it had never occurred to me that they could be used this way. This is yet another reason to use an algorithm like bcrypt that will generate different hashes for the same password. I'm also amazed people put such obvious password hints, and some even had their exact password as the hint.
- corin_ 13y agoA basic salted hash would prevent this sort of thing (not saying that bcrypt/etc. aren't worth using). As to people using obvious password hints, it depends how much you care about the account - I don't use hints anywhere, but there's plenty of accounts I have where I really wouldn't care if anyone logged into it, so if I was someone who needed hints, then sure why not?
- aw3c2 13y agoA basic salt could be just a fixed string being used. That would not prevent this. The salt would need to vary per hash.
- eCa 13y agoThe obvious solution is to salt it with something that is unique to that account: The internal account id, a string randomized at account creation or something like that. An identical password for two different accounts should never encrypt to the same string.
- hag 13y agoThe salt should always be random. If it's based on some account information it's possible that the salt can be regenerated if that account information would become available, in a DB dump like this for example.
- eCa 13y agoIf they had used different salts for every account, and that salt was published in this dump it would have been much more difficult to find identical passwords compared to the current situation. I'm not sure how you can keep the salt random and secret, and still use it when users log in?
- sillysaurus2 13y agoSalts aren't secret. The point of salting a password is to prevent the password (like "alskdjfalsdf") from always hashing to the same result (like "j9p+HwtWWT86aMjgZFLzYg=="). That prevents rainbow table attacks (among others) and it doesn't require the salt be secret.
- jsmeaton 13y agoRight. But the parent comment was replying to a comment suggesting that a user id (or other account information) shouldn't be used as it's not random. I can't see why a user id could not be used as a salt though.
- justincormack 13y ago
- kevjiang 13y agoAmazingly, these aren't even password hashes.. they're encrypted versions of the password. Ars wrote an article on this yesterday [1]. Basically if anyone has the encryption key, they'd be able to decrypt ALL passwords in the list. [1] http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/how-an-epic-blunder-by-adobe-could-strengthen-hand-of-password-crackers/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/how-an-epic-blunder-...
- anonymous 13y agoActually you maybe don't even need the key. I don't know what algorithm Adobe used to encrypt these passwords, but for most standard ones it holds that if you have two encrypted messages A' and B' corresponding to plain texts A and B, then B = A ^ A' ^ B'. You really only need to find one password of length N to be able to decrypt all passwords with length <= N. Edit: Of course I mean two messages encrypted with the same key and initialisation vector. Do not reuse IVs kids, you'll get hurt.
- tcas 13y agoThat's true of stream ciphers, and if they reuse a nonce. It looks like they used 3DES which is for all intents and purposes here, immune to a this kind of attack. EDIT: If they use 3DES in a CTR mode then it could be vulnerable to this, but looking at the base64ed texts in the blog posts, they are multiples of 8 meaning it is almost certainly in a block cipher mode. Would be interesting to see if you can find any block similarities if they used ECB.
- mischanix 13y agoThis is really neat. Adobe stated the hashes are 3DES/ECB. So, say I have a two block password with '6aMjgZFLzYg' as the second block... when I just search for that block I see alot of hints that point to '123456789' as a password, implying the plaintext for that block is simply '9'. So now I believe the password is 9 characters long and ends with '9'.
- rmrfrmrf 13y agolol; "should have used a salt" is one of the most hilarious HN memes.
- corin_ 13y agoMy point wasn't that using a salt is good practice, just that Adobe's method was so bad that even a salt+hash would have been better.
- scottmcleod 13y agoSame - I like how he solved this 'problem'
- sitkack 13y agoThis is also why shouldn't answer "secret questions" about yourself. These can be aggregated and gleaned from other sites. Exactly how Palin's mail was "hacked", dog's name off of a wikipedia page.
- KMag 13y agoThat's why I use dd if=/dev/random bs=1 count=16 | base64 to rename my dog every 182 days. He gets a bit confused at first, but adjusts quickly enough.
- saurik 13y ago> I'm also amazed people put such obvious password hints, and some even had their exact password as the hint. This password protects something I doubt many people consider something that needs to be very secure. Why, therefore, should they use a complex password, or even feel the need to have a password at all? The risks associated with someone "hacking" your Adobe.com account are going to mostly seem like problems for Adobe, not problems for the user (and even the problems for Adobe are fairly dubious). Meanwhile, it is something you are pretty much never going to log in to. It's like having a filing cabinet at your office that contains nothing but blank paper for the copy machine requiring a ten digit passcode. As the employee assigned a passcode for this cabinet, you are not going to consider the paper very valuable and you are hardly ever going to need to get into the cabinet to get that paper... why would you /not/ end up scrawling your passcode onto a post-it note somewhere (potentially even hiding it near the cabinet). To get people to care about security you need to get them to care about the information being secured. In this case, I can't imagine most people would understand that anything in this account is valuable. Even to a more-trained-than-normal eye, it isn't 100% clear to me: you can read my tech support history (which might tell you more about myself or my work) and you can get my saved billing address (it does not save actual account information). My address (not everyone's, just mine) is already public record. Really, the biggest concern is just that someone is going to change the e-mail address on my account and lock me out of it, preventing me from downloading licenses. I doubt your average normal user is going to even realize that changing the e-mail address on their account is possible, however (given the ways in which developers tend to use e-mail addresses and usernames interchangeably, I don't even blame them: this is a confusing concept and not every site provides the same functionality anyway).
- plywoodtrees 13y agoAdobe do cloud photo storage, I believe keyed off the same account. That could be highly sensitive data. People may have created their account and password for low value stuff and then started storing photos. Your general point is of course correct.
- PeterisP 13y agoYour filing cabinet example is spot on. If the cabinet for storing blank paper that I don't care about (and it's my cabinet, not something entrusted to me for safeguarding) requires a passcode, then I'd both set the passcode to '0000000' or '123456', and write it on a post-it note right there. Similarly, if some website or forum that I don't care about (and don't fear if someone or everyone accesses my account) starts for me to require an account+password that I don't want - then I'd both set the password to something trivial ('password' ?) and ensure that my browser stores it so I don't have to. In an ideal world, I wouldn't have that account/password at all - most of accounts listed in my browser password-list are accounts where some site forces me to keep a password that I don't want to 'keep an account', do 'personalization', etc. For example, I have a (free) account on Spotify. Is there any good reason why I should have a secure password there? Is there any good reason why I shouldn't tweet that password to everyone, other that Spotify itself might dislike it?
- C1D 13y agoThey could've prevented this with using a salt, but instead of using a salt they make it even worse by not hashing but using encryption. Basically if some one got the key they could get the passwords to everything including the FBI Agents and then they could possibly hack their emails.
- bobbyi_settv 13y agoIn the screenshot, no one is using the exact password as their reminder, presumably because it isn't allowed. The reminders include 12345, 1234567, 123456789, 654321 and 1to6. The author concludes that the password is 123456.
- user24 13y agoVery nice use of password hints. Userwise salted hashes would defeat this attack though.
- frank_boyd 13y ago> salted hashes would defeat this attack though. Seriously. A huge company like Adobe behaving like a beginner in programming? WTF.
- ye 13y agoThat's the biggest WTF about the whole story. I understand leaks and breaches happen, but we've had two decades of them and learned a few things that make DB leaks pretty useless.
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoThey're still better than Yahoo!, who had 450K+ plaintext credentials dumped last year.
- coldcode 13y agoThe best thing about leaking people's databases full of password hashes is teaching people how stupid it is to do it wrong. The worst thing is that most people in charge of this apparently don't read.
- cheald 13y ago> A huge company like Adobe behaving like a beginner in programming? WTF. You are aware that Flash and Acrobat Reader are the attack vectors for something like 50% of all Windows malware, yeah?
- scarmig 13y agoI'm sure you're also aware that, for all Adobe's faults, there's a world of difference between making mistakes writing novel software solutions versus not salting or hashing your passwords. One type of mistake is inevitable on some level, while the other just should not happen.
- casca 13y agoThis is an interesting attack that uses other people's password hints to match a hashed password. However, it seems unlikely that the Edward Snowden would use such a weak password to protect any resource that he considered sensitive. Please use a randomly generated password that is as long and complex as the site you're using will allow, stored in a password safe.
- wereHamster 13y agoI don't trust third parties to securely store my passwords. The problem with randomly generated passwords it that they are hard (impossible?) to memorize. Password squares help there, because they allow you to visually memorize the password by using a path inside a random character grid. I recently created a website that generates a random 'password square'. It should display nicely on latest browsers (which support flexbox). You can optionally supply a seed if you want to reuse the same path but have it yield a different password. https://caurea.org/passwd/ https://caurea.org/passwd/ https://caurea.org/passwd/#seed https://caurea.org/passwd/#seed The website is intentially barebones, to allow you to print it out and store offline.
- Shish2k 13y ago> It should display nicely on latest browsers (which support flexbox) So after years of telling people "Don't use table tags for layout", web devs have finally got that message... and they've started using layout tags for tables instead :(
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoIn no way is that a table. It's a grid.
- dnr 13y agoIf you're memorizing a lot of passwords, you're doing it wrong. Use a password manager and memorize one, that no sites ever see. (In practice you'll probably want to memorize another one or two for important accounts and a login password.)
- herghost 13y agoSo this is effectively "crowd-sourcing" a hack - other peoples' collectively bad op-sec used against you...
- dutchbrit 13y agoThe question that the blog writer didn't ask himself is: How many people are called Edward Snowden?
- 3rd3 13y agoHe did, but didn’t write about it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- CurtMonash 13y agoSo this proves that at some sites you really shouldn't use a password that it's likely a lot of other people will use as well. Wasn't that already clear due to the threat of dictionary attacks?
- ivanhoe 13y agoHints are really bad idea. I used to add that feature, but after seeing what people enter there I've removed it from all projects. Even without someone dumping your DB, people are usually too descriptive or they use some data they think is private, but that is actually easy to get with a little research and social engineering. I remember one guy's hint was: "The best car ever", and you could easily find that he posted a tones of pictures of his new BMW on Facebook... of course, the password was bmwrulez, it took me like 10 minutes to figure it out without any cracker app...
- alexkus 13y agoOn the other front, these passwords are all encrypted (not hashed) using 3DES in EBC mode. Something encrypted with by (single) DES could be broken within 7 days about 2 years ago by some bespoke hardware. If Adobe have been using the same key for each part of the triple DES key then you can assume that bespoke hardware of several years ago could get the key within 3 weeks (3DES being ~3 times the work of single DES). With advances in technology this is probably down to less than a week. Let's just hope that they used a full 168-bit key, rather than repeating the single 56-bit key, and that it never gets leaked.
- theboss 13y agoUsing the same key 3 times would be equivalent to using 1 key and performing 1 encrypt operation. It is almost certainly not the case that adobe is using the same key for all 3 operations. It's probably more effort to do anyways
- alexkus 13y agoAh yes, I was getting the various Keying options mixed up in my head:- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_DES#Keying_options http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_DES#Keying_options [EDIT] It does seem odd though that the passwords are encrypted and not hashed, but the hints are in plaintext. Why didn't they also encrypt the hints? (Rhetorical, the answer is probably just laziness/incompetence). Even if you do use bcrypt() or similar for hashing the passwords then encrypting the hints would prevent similar tactics being available from just a dump of the table contents.
- theboss 13y agoHashing is the correct way but big companies commonly do things wrong. If they had a sqli vulnerability in their site without knowing it's also possible that they didn't even know this database existed.
- anonymouz 13y ago> ... could get the key within 3 weeks (3DES being ~3 times the work of single DES). Absolutely not! Trippling the key length does not just triple the strength... Against brute force every extra bit will force you to invest twice the time. Though 3DES only provides an effective security equivalent to 112 bits even with the strongest keying option due to an attack on it (instead of 168 bits). It's still probably infeasible to brute force currently: The factor between brute forcing DES and 3DES is about 2^56=7*10^16 (that's a big number!), not 3 as you seem to believe.
- founder4fun 13y agoSo i was one of the millions affected by Adobe's hack. Should I be worried, when I canceled my credit card immediately and used a spam address to sign up? The only details the hackers would have on me would be my name, canceled credit card number, email address (spam email address) and answers to secret questions. Is there anything else I should be concerned about?
- kevjiang 13y agoYou should probably assume that they have your password too. Since Adobe encrypted the passwords instead of hashing them, all of these passwords will be known once the encryption key is discovered. Someone could possibly use the method in the article to guess your password as well. So if you use the same password on any other websites, better change it.
- KMag 13y agoYou should probably immediately rename your dog and lobby your home town to change the name of the street where you grew up.
- badinker 13y agoTop 100 using this hack http://pastebin.com/iDTFARwq http://pastebin.com/iDTFARwq
- pasbesoin 13y agoPassword hints are simply multi-factor passwords with, when used as intended, really crappy entropy and often crappy back-end handling/storage. If you must suffer them, use random values that you note locally and store safely (just like your password). (Or that you don't store at all, simply foregoing ever being able to use the password hints mechanism.) And, adjust your level of trust in and comfort with the site, accordingly.
- AJ007 13y agoLessons: a) Don't have an email address with your real name in it. b) Have several different active email addresses. c) Never reuse passwords. d) Only Use passwords that are a random string of alphanumeric characters. e) Never use a hint that actually means anything. I find it hard to believe that the real Snowden would use a single dictionary word as a password.
- senorprogrammer 13y agoRegarding your last point, and as pure conjecture, it depends on how old the password is. When I was a student signing up for trial software etc. I often thought such things like "No one will ever guess 'offspring' as my password, that band is so obscure!" Young me was much less paranoid than old me.
- berberous 13y agoIt's also possible that he only used a simple password for sites that don't matter - like Adobe - but used a stronger password for his e-mail, bank, etc.
- treetrouble 13y agoThis is a perfectly interesting post, but why target Snowden? Guess it's eye catching
- yOutely 13y agoLinkbait scummery.
- EGreg 13y agoIf you insist on rolling your own password scheme, just have the following: A unique salt per account (eg the username or some stringb you store alongside the hash) Key strengthening - run the has some number of times over 1000, preferably prime Any kind of cryptographic has, I think even md5 would be fine if the above are followed
- mcv 13y agoSo even if I don't use a password hint, other people who use hints will still give away my password. Of course this is just an Adobe account. I don't think there's anything of value on there, is there?
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoOnly if you use a password which can be obviously 'hinted at', and that's unlikely to be a very good password in the first place. Except, maybe, if it's a password phrase.
- denzil_correa 13y agoWhat happened to the "No change in Title" rule of HN?