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Feds tell Web firms to turn over user account passwords
<http://groups.google.com/group/sid-l/t/8128441ce5667ff1>
Sid Shniad <shn...@gmail.com> Jul 26 12:05PM -0700
*
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57595529-38/feds-tell-web-firms-to-turn-over-user-account-passwords/
CNET July 25, 2013
Feds tell Web firms to turn over user account passwords
Secret demands mark escalation in Internet surveillance by the federal
government through gaining access to user passwords, which are typically
stored in encrypted form.
by Declan McCullagh*
The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge
users' stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with
these orders, which represent an escalation in surveillance
techniques that
has not previously been disclosed.
If the government is able to determine a person's password, which is
typically stored in encrypted form, the credential could be used to
log in
to an account to peruse confidential correspondence or even
impersonate the
user. Obtaining it also would aid in deciphering encrypted devices in
situations where passwords are reused.
"I've certainly seen them ask for passwords," said one Internet industry
source who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We push back."
A second person who has worked at a large Silicon Valley company
confirmed
that it received legal requests from the federal government for stored
passwords. Companies "really heavily scrutinize" these requests, the
person
said. "There's a lot of 'over my dead body.'"
Some of the government orders demand not only a user's password but also
the encryption algorithm and the so-called salt, according to a person
familiar with the requests. A salt is a random string of letters or
numbers
used to make it more difficult to reverse the encryption process and
determine the original password. Other orders demand the secret question
codes often associated with user accounts.
"This is one of those unanswered legal questions: Is there any
circumstance under which they could get password information?"
--Jennifer Granick, Stanford University
A Microsoft spokesperson would not say whether the company has received
such requests from the government. But when asked whether Microsoft
would
divulge passwords, salts, or algorithms, the spokesperson replied:
"No, we
don't, and we can't see a circumstance in which we would provide it."
Google also declined to disclose whether it had received requests
for those
types of data. But a spokesperson said the company has "never"
turned over
a user's encrypted password, and that it has a legal team that
frequently
pushes back against requests that are fishing expeditions or are
otherwise
problematic. "We take the privacy and security of our users very
seriously," the spokesperson said.
A Yahoo spokeswoman would not say whether the company had received such
requests. The spokeswoman said: "If we receive a request from law
enforcement for a user's password, we deny such requests on the grounds
that they would allow overly broad access to our users' private
information. If we are required to provide information, we do so only in
the strictest interpretation of what is required by law."
Apple, Facebook, AOL, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast
did not
respond to queries about whether they have received requests for users'
passwords and how they would respond to them.
Richard Lovejoy, a director of the Opera Software subsidiary that
operates
FastMail <https://www.fastmail.fm/>, said he doesn't recall
receiving any
such requests but that the company still has a relatively small
number of
users compared with its larger rivals. Because of that, he said, "we
don't
get a high volume" of U.S. government demands.
The FBI declined to comment.
Some details remain unclear, including when the requests began and
whether
the government demands are always targeted at individuals or seek entire
password database dumps. The Patriot Act has been used to demand entire
database
dumps<http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57587929-38/nsa-secretly-vacuumed-up-verizon-phone-records/>of
phone call logs, and critics have suggested its use is broader. "The
authority of the government is essentially limitless" under that
law, Sen.
Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who serves on the Senate Intelligence
committee, said at a Washington
event<http://www.americanprogressaction.org/events/2013/07/16/69750/senator-ron-wyden-on-domestic-data-collection-and-privacy-rights/>this
week.
Large Internet companies have resisted the government's requests by
arguing
that "you don't have the right to operate the account as a person,"
according to a person familiar with the issue. "I don't know what
happens
when the government goes to smaller providers and demands user
passwords,"
the person said.
An attorney who represents Internet companies said he has not fielded
government password requests, but "we've certainly had reset
requests -- if
you have the device in your possession, than a password reset is the
easier
way."
Source code to a C implementation of bcrypt, a popular algorithm
used for
password hashing. (Credit: Photo by Declan McCullagh)
*Cracking the codes*
Even if the National Security Agency or the FBI successfully obtains an
encrypted password, salt, and details about the algorithm used,
unearthing
a user's original password is hardly guaranteed. The odds of success
depend
in large part on two factors: the type of algorithm and the
complexity of
the password.
Algorithms, known as hash functions, that are viewed as suitable for
scrambling stored passwords are designed to be difficult to reverse. One
popular hash function called MD5, for instance, transforms the phrase
"National Security Agency" into this string of seemingly random
characters:
84bd1c27b26f7be85b2742817bb8d43b. Computer scientists believe that, if a
hash function is well-designed, the original phrase cannot be
derived from
the output.
But modern computers, especially ones equipped with high-performance
video
cards, can test passwords scrambled with MD5 and other well-known hash
algorithms at the rate of billions a
second<http://hashcat.net/oclhashcat-lite/#performance>.
One system using 25 Radeon-powered GPUs that was
demonstrated<http://www.zdnet.com/25-gpus-devour-password-hashes-at-up-to-348-billion-per-second-7000008368/>at
a conference last December tested 348 billion hashes per second,
meaning
it would crack a 14-character Windows XP password in six minutes.
The best practice among Silicon Valley companies is to adopt far slower
hash algorithms -- designed to take a large fraction of a second to
scramble a password -- that have been intentionally crafted to make
it more
difficult and expensive for the NSA and other attackers to test every
possible combination.
One popular algorithm, used by Twitter and LinkedIn, is called bcrypt. A
2009 paper (PDF <http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt/scrypt.pdf>) by computer
scientist Colin Percival <http://www.daemonology.net/> estimated that it
would cost a mere $4 to crack, in an average of one year, an 8-character
bcrypt password composed only of letters. To do it in an average of one
day, the hardware cost would jump to approximately $1,500.
But if a password of the same length included numbers, asterisks,
punctuation marks, and other special characters, the cost-per-year
leaps to
$130,000. Increasing the length to any 10 characters, Percival
estimated in
2009, brings the estimated cracking cost to a staggering $1.2 billion.
As computers have become more powerful, the cost of cracking bcrypt
passwords has decreased. "I'd say as a rough ballpark, the current cost
would be around 1/20th of the numbers I have in my paper," said
Percival,
who founded a company called Tarsnap Backup <http://www.tarsnap.com/>,
which offers "online backups for the truly paranoid." Percival added
that a
government agency would likely use ASICs -- application-specific
integrated
circuits -- for password cracking because it's "the most
cost-efficient --
at large scale -- approach."
While developing Tarsnap, Percival devised an algorithm called
scrypt<http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html>,
which he estimates can make the "cost of a hardware brute-force attack"
against a hashed password as much as 4,000 times greater than bcrypt.
Bcrypt was introduced
(PDF<https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix99/provos/provos.pdf>)
at a 1999 Usenix conference by Niels Provos <http://www.provos.org/>,
currently a distinguished engineer in Google's infrastructure group,
and David
Mazières <http://www.scs.stanford.edu/%7Edm/>, an associate professor of
computer science at Stanford University.
With the computers available today, "bcrypt won't pipeline very well in
hardware," Mazières said, so it would "still be very expensive to do
widespread cracking."
Even if "the NSA is asking for access to hashed bcrypt passwords,"
Mazières
said, "that doesn't necessarily mean they are cracking them." Easier
approaches, he said, include an order to extract them from the server or
network when the user logs in -- which has been done
before<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai>-- or
installing a keylogger
at the client <http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9741357-7.html>.
Sen. Ron Wyden, who warned this week that "the authority of the
government
is essentially limitless" under the Patriot Act's business records
provision. (Credit: Getty Images)
*Questions of law*
Whether the National Security Agency or FBI has the legal authority to
demand that an Internet company divulge a hashed password, salt, and
algorithm remains murky.
"This is one of those unanswered legal questions: Is there any
circumstance
under which they could get password information?" said Jennifer
Granick<http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/about/people/jennifer-granick>,
director of civil liberties at Stanford University's Center for Internet
and Society. "I don't know."
Granick said she's not aware of any precedent for an Internet
company "to
provide passwords, encrypted or otherwise, or password algorithms to the
government -- for the government to crack passwords and use them
unsupervised." If the password will be used to log in to the
account, she
said, that's "prospective surveillance," which would require a wiretap
order or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act order.
If the government can subsequently determine the password, "there's a
concern that the provider is enabling unauthorized access to the user's
account if they do that," Granick said. That could, she said, raise
legal
issues under the Stored Communications Act and the Computer Fraud
and Abuse
Act.
The Justice Department has argued in court proceedings before that
it has
broad legal authority to obtain passwords. In 2011, for instance,
federal
prosecutors sent a grand jury subpoena demanding the password that would
unlock files encrypted with the TrueCrypt
<http://www.truecrypt.org/>utility.
The Florida man who received the subpoena claimed the Fifth Amendment,
which protects his right to avoid self-incrimination, allowed him to
refuse
the prosecutors' demand. In February 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the Eleventh Circuit agreed, saying that because prosecutors could
bring a
criminal prosecution against him based on the contents of the decrypted
files, the man "could not be compelled to decrypt the drives."
In January 2012, a federal district judge in Colorado reached the
opposite
conclusion, ruling that a criminal defendant could be compelled
under the
All Writs Act to type in the password that would unlock a Toshiba
Satellite
laptop.
Both of those cases, however, deal with criminal proceedings when the
password holder is the target of an investigation -- and don't
address when
a hashed password is stored on the servers of a company that's an
innocent
third party.
"If you can figure out someone's password, you have the ability to reuse
the account," which raises significant privacy concerns, said Seth
Schoen<https://www.eff.org/about/staff/seth-schoen>,
a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation<https://www.eff.org/>.
Last updated at 8:00 p.m. PT with comment from Yahoo, which
responded after
this article was published.
*Disclosure: McCullagh is married to a Google employee not involved with
this issue.*
Declan McCullagh <http://www.mccullagh.org/> is the chief political
correspondent for CNET. Declan previously was a reporter for Time
and the
Washington bureau chief for Wired and wrote the Taking Liberties section
and Other People's Money column for CBS News' Web site.
--
---------------------
Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
8888 University Drive
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Home: Phone 604-689-9510
Cell: 604-789-4803
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