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Adobe confirms stolen passwords were encrypted, not hashed
- xxchan 13y agoRemind me, what year is this again?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 13y agoThis is a relatively recent development for Rails. Lots of major Rails-backed products were developed during the 2.x era and still have salted SHA1 passwords.
- bigiain 13y agoHeh - I was just reading: "When security code fails, you find out 4 years from now, when a DVD with all your customer’s credit card and CVV2 information starts circulating in Estonia." Written by some familiar-sounding guy about 6 years back (which, based on the wikipedia timeline, is 7 major Rails releases ago): http://www.securityfocus.com/blogs/262 http://www.securityfocus.com/blogs/262 ;-)
- moloch 13y agoThe leaked passwords were different lengths, of course they weren't hashed.
- CamperBob2 13y ago(Sorry for the accidental downvote -- #%?!!@% tiny arrows, right next to each other)
- antocv 13y agoIts okay, I upvoted it back for you.
- 001sky 13y agoAdobe says that they've followed best practices for password storage and protection for more than a year now... 13 generations of photoshop ...and they're just getting around to this after CS6?
- nwh 13y agoI wouldn't call Photoshop an achievement, it's a hodgepodge of old libraries and bugs at the best of times. Adobe refused to patch a vulnerability in CS5 at one point, telling people to purchase and upgrade to CS6 (US$199) if they wanted to not be vulnerable to malicious code execution. In response to the uproar they eventually backported the patch. [0]: http://www.macworld.com/article/1166779/adobe_will_issue_free_security_patches_for_high_profile_creative_suite_apps.html http://www.macworld.com/article/1166779/adobe_will_issue_fre...
- scotth 13y agoNot a constructive comment, sorry, but I couldn't help chuckle reading this. It's beyond ridiculous.
- null_ptr 13y agoMammoth corporations have fuck-all to do with common sense. They're run by apathetic shills that couldn't care less about technology, progress, or people (not to knock the talent that works in the trenches).
- smtddr 13y agoIf Photoshop, basically industry standard in image-editing software, isn't an achievement... then nothing qualifies as an achievement. And this is coming from someone who prefers GIMP on linux. I would love to produce something even a quarter as popular & usable as Photoshop.
- nwh 13y agoIt's not. Have a look at what it's users have to put up with on a daily basis. http://bad-adobe.tumblr.com http://bad-adobe.tumblr.com
- mikkelewis 13y agoAll my passwords are different and this still pisses me off.
- nwh 13y agoYou're going to be getting a lot of spam in the near future, the list of emails isn't exactly a secret anymore.
- tptacek 13y agothe top options being bcrypt, scrypt, PBKDF2, or SHA-2 Thanks, CSO Magazine!
- cperciva 13y agoOne of those does not belong on that list...
- nitrogen 13y agoWhy is SHA-2 in the list? [Looks like cperciva beat me to it, 0 minutes ago] Something I've always wondered about SHA and MD5, though: if you feed the output of a hash function into its input enough times, will you eventually reach the original value? Will you have traversed the entire output space of the hash, or will there be multiple closed loops, or perhaps even multiple starting points converging on a single terminal loop?
- tedunangst 13y agoThere has to be at least one loop (or fixed point that maps to itself). There's only a finite set of outputs, and the input space of strings as long as a hash is at least that large (in theory, some output hashes may not be possible to generate). Ideally you'd have very large, long loops, which implies few collisions.
- darkmighty 13y agoAt least one loop, but it could be the trivial one (ideally?): take the trivial case where the hash is simply a unit cyclic shift of the first N-bits -- there's just the full loop.
- mayneack 13y agoAnyone got a link to where one might check for the presence of their own email in this list?
- dorian-graph 13y agohttp://adobe.cynic.al/ http://adobe.cynic.al/
- sb23 13y agoIs it ironic that to check if my email is vulnerable i'm typing it in to a website that i'm not sure whether to trust?
- neltnerb 13y agoMy thought exactly... I did not choose to do so =P
- hamburglar 13y agoIs there a better way than typing my email address into a site of questionable integrity?
- CamperBob2 13y agoIt's not too hard to find a link to the .tar.gz on Mega.co.nz, if you don't mind burning 9 GB of disk space. It's a plain text file, so you can just grep it. The consequences of this release are going to be felt for a long time. It's the worst thing I've ever seen happen on the Internet, and I've been around a while.
- bigiain 13y agoI suspect as "the worst thing ever on the internet" it'll do wonders for sales/downloads of 1Password/Keypass/Lastpass/whatever, and bring awareness of the need, as well as the ability to easily have separate strong passwords for _every_ site/account/login to "the general public" - which'll be a big win for internet security generally (at the expense of everybody who loses out from exposed and re-used credentials). I have a possibly-not-too-paranoid suspicion that "the worst thing resulting from the 2013 Adobe compromise" may yet be to be revealed. People have joked for years about the "Adobe updater virus" – but what's protecting everybody who's now so familiar with weekly or monthly Acrobat/Flash/Air update boxes popping up asking for admin credentials? If they lost the Photoshop source code, is it even vaguely plausible to suggest they couldn't possibly have also lost root on the update servers, or their SSL private keys, or admin access to the dns zonefiles, or the adobe.com registrar credentials, or any of the other steps in the chain that'd allow attackers to push a malicious Adobe update?
- fleitz 13y ago3DES in ECB mode... great job guys. Really really well done.
- discardorama 13y agoAdobe, once again. The gift that keeps on giving. After inflicting Flash on the Internet for 15 years, now this. Has any other company caused as much grief on the Internet as Adobe?
- tedunangst 13y agoAdobe has only owned Flash for the past 8 years. The first (and I'd say, most relevant) 9 years of infliction were caused by an independent Macromedia.
- andrewflnr 13y agoMaybe the one responsible for IE6? But I'm told even that was an advance at the time.
- gopalv 13y agoXkcd said it best, this is going to make the best cross-word puzzle ever with the password hints and hashes :) https://xkcd.com/1286/ https://xkcd.com/1286/ "Weather vane sword" and "sexy earlobes" indeed.
- kevinxucs 13y agoWhat's worse, see http://xkcd.com/1286/ http://xkcd.com/1286/ They use a technique similar to ECB, which results in completely linear cipher text blocks.
- yeukhon 13y agoThe xkcd references comic 792 and I totally agree that at any given time there is a website people going to sign up and they will never realize the author of the website stores everything in plaintext so he could get your username and password. This is why we need to push identity services like Persona.
- ssafejava 13y agoSo, if Adobe engineers eventually realized that they needed to upgrade their password security, and they had access to the passwords in their DB (they used 3DES, and they had the key) - why did they not immediately decrypt and hash all passwords?
- jordanthoms 13y agoIt sounds like they did do that, and this system was the old database which was no longer in use, but they didn't shut it down.
- acqq 13y agoSee neya's comment here, who believes his credit card was taken from there amd he claims to have recently purchase something. My theory is Adobe didn't use SHA2 even recently, it's probably something that they only started to develop. And SHA2 is still wrong, BTW. See other comments here.
- nudetayne 13y agoAnytime I register anywhere, I do the following: 1. Use a new or willing-to-be-spammed email address. 2. Use a new phrase-based password. I write all of this information down on pieces of paper that I keep at my desk. I have a lot of scribbled up paper at this point.
- bigiain 13y agoHow long have you been doing that? There's an email address of mine in that list that is much more likely to have been given to Macromedia back in the late '90s or very early 2000s - I was working at a different company in '02 and am quite unlikely to have given the older email address out after then…
- nudetayne 13y agoSince about 2004 I think? Anything before that, I think it was an AOL email address. If they can access it, they can have it.
- josefresco 13y agoLock your office doors!
- jordanthoms 13y agoTo play devil's advocate here, isn't this actually more secure than something like MD5 or SHA1 without stretch factors or multiple invocations, assuming that the key was not also stolen? My reasoning is, that in order for an attacker to get the passwords out of this dump, they have to break the 3DES encryption. Brute forcing the key is, as I understand it, still very difficult, and without it they can't get any of the passwords. If someone did find the key however, they'd have instant access to all of the passwords no matter how complex. On the other hand, if the passwords had been protected using an unsuitable hash algorithm, the highly efficient GPU-based crackers would be able to find millions of people's passwords very quickly, using the sophisticated dictionaries and mangling techniques that are around now. Even quite complex passwords can often be found in this way, since the GPU crackers have got so fast they can try billions of combinations - e.g. even things like "!)@(#*$&%^Test123" can be cracked. [1] [2]. Although, extremely long and complex passwords should be safe. Obviously, I'm not advocating we all switch to 3DES for our password storage, and the huge risk here is that the key was also stolen - but I'm wondering if my reasoning is actually right here, and that people without extremely strong passwords are better off with this leak than if it'd been MD5. [1] - http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how-crackers-make-minced-meat-out-of-your-passwords/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how-crackers-make-mi... [2] - http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/how-the-bible-and-youtube-are-fueling-the-next-frontier-of-password-cracking/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/how-the-bible-and-yo...
- tedunangst 13y agoRoughly, yes. You can't just run through the database and crack every account that used one of the top 1000 passwords (password, secret, sex, ...). But since you can see all the accounts that have the same password, that lets you: 1. identify all the people who used a popular password 2. identify anyone who happened to use the same password as one you already know, such as your own. 1 + 2 = 3. if you mount an online attack against the people from 1), once one account is cracked you instantly know all the others as well, and can probably dodge any security of the three fails and you're in timeout variety. The security afforded by the 3DES key (assuming it's a secret) should be greater than the security of a password like "adob3" even with a good hashing technique.
- neya 13y agoI don't know about the passwords, but my card was successfully stolen[1] and a malicious transaction was initiated from another country. I know this was because of Adobe for sure because I (co-incidentally) used a brand new, fresh, unique e-mail address just for Adobe, and that email was released recently in the dump that the hackers provided. Luckily the malicious transaction was declined by my bank and they blocked the card for me and they told me that someone had compromised my card details and issued me with a replacement card free of charge. I only keep posting this in every thread[1][2] about Adobe because I genuinely want other Adobe customers to understand the gravity of the situation and disable their compromised credit card and get it replaced by a new one as soon as possible. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6668013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6668013 [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6632385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6632385
- jordanthoms 13y agoSo you know for sure your email was stolen in the attack, but how do you know the credit card was?
- neya 13y agoIt was only the night before the hack had I bought an Upgrade to the CS6 suite. In all probability, mine would have been listed out in the recent few transactions on Adobe's database, maybe? There is only one other service I am using this card with - A stock photo site and they haven't announced any security issues, yet. Plus, I always am required to enter my card details on their site each time I buy something, in all likelihood, they aren't probably storing the card on their servers, which leads us to the culprit, Adobe. Also, I am very security conscious in general. I am no security expert, but I always use Linux/Mac to make transactions, with Firewalls, stuff like that.
- jrnkntl 13y agoMy creditcard and the one of my coworker got blocked too; I only use this one for company expenses, Adobe being one of them. The only overlapping service my coworker and I paid for with a creditcard was: Adobe. We both got a new one in a week from our banks; but this, to me, makes it look like it was definitely compromised because of the Adobe breach.
- pasbesoin 13y agoAs a small aside about Adobe security practices, I needed customer support from them the other year (its own horror story). As part of this, customer support insisted on setting up an Adobe account, although I'd purchased the product through a third party vendor and not directly from Adobe (as it turns out, thank goodness!). When looking up that account information, I saw the note I made as to the original password they gave that account that they set up: "123456". I had changed it away from that; I suspect a significant number of their users might not have. Glad that account contained only a name and ZIP code / town. AND the serial number. If someone consumed a spare slot on the serial number, I shudder to think of how many hours on the phone with Adobe support it might take to get that slot freed up.
- nightcracker 13y ago"Adobe says that they've followed best practices for password storage and protection for more than a year now, as their authentication systems were upgraded to use SHA-256, with salt, to protect customer passwords." Absolute bullshit! SHA-256 with salt is totally inadequate for password storage, they should use a PBKDF like scrypt.
- viraptor 13y agoDepends on the number of rounds used. It can be brought up to a reasonable time complexity this way and is definitely not inadequate. Worse than some alternatives? Sure. But it still gives reasonable protection.
- brohee 13y agoIf they said SHA-256 with salt, excuse us to think it is just that, with no iteration. If it's iterated SHA-256 it becomes a lot closer to PBKDF and one wonder why they would not use it. Given Adobe history wrt security, let us assume the worst.
- viraptor 13y agoThat is the standard in the password libraries really. passlib uses thousands of rounds of sha-256, so does glibc, etc. Unless they implemented the whole thing from scratch, they wouldn't be using a single run of sha-256. It's not impossible, but I'd say at this point it's unlikely they're doing something silly - it would be a job terminating mistake for whoever implemented the new system after the last fiasco.
- borplk 13y agoNowadays that everyone has lots of accounts and there are so many good password managers around I don't know why losing passwords is so important. I couldn't care less if Adobe stored my password in plaintext. It's unique to that service and used absolutely nowhere else and I don't even have to remember it.
- DavidJohnson 13y agoI've heard from several people/companies in InfoSec have copies of the database and are actively analyzing it. Shouldn't be too hard to find if you wish to check yourself against the compromised list.
- jgreen10 13y agoPlain hashing and encryption are equally silly, especially without salt. Use bcrypt.
- piratebroadcast 13y agoSomeone explain the difference to me like I'm 5 please? (Not trolling btw)