Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Parks, Raymond]

WRT password cracking - Dan Goodin has a good series of articles on password 
cracking at Ars Technica.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/how-i-became-a-password-cracker/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how-crackers-make-minced-meat-out-of-your-passwords/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/how-the-bible-and-youtube-are-fueling-the-next-frontier-of-password-cracking/

TL;DR - Current GPU-based password cracking using 20-million word dictionaries 
make truly random passwords below 14 characters and nearl all pass-phrases 
susceptible to cracking in a relatively short time.

On a related subject, roughly 75% of websites store passwords as nothing more 
complicated than simple, unsalted MD5 hashes.  This is almost as easy to break 
as as NTLM.

Salt makes the initial crack more difficult, but if the same salt is used for 
all hashes, then subsequent cracks ignore it.

WRT the use of PII - it's sold on various markets, correlated in a "big data" 
manner with other exposures, and, if enough information is available and the 
person's credit score is high enough, is used for credit attacks.  In some 
cases, if banking information is correlated, the collection is used for banking 
attacks.  If there is poor correlation but an email or FQDN is in the 
information, then the data may be used as a target list.

Ray Parks
Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov
SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder)
JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder)



On Nov 18, 2013, at 10:12 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:

> A forum I belong to has been hacked, including personal info as well as 
> passwords.
> 
> How do they use this information?
> 
> I presume they try the hash function on all combinations of possible 
> passwords.  (Naturally optimized for faster convergence).  They see a match, 
> i.e. a letter combination resulting in the given hash of the password.
> 
> If they crack one password, does that make cracking the rest any easier?
> 
> And does "salt" simply increase the difficulty, and indeed can it be deduced, 
> as above, by cracking a single password?
> 
> .. or is it all quite different from this!
> 
>-- Owen
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com



smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[cody dooderson]

I find passwords really hard to remember. Especially those sites that
require numbers, symbols,uppercase, and lower case characters. I personally
would rather use a 20 character all lowercase
passwordthan an
8 character mixed symbol password. As a result keep a document, in
the cloud, with all of my passwords stored in plain text. Many of these
passwords I could care less if someone cracked.
Also, I was under the impression that salting prevents the use of rainbow
tables .

Cody Smith


On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 11:28 AM, Parks, Raymond  wrote:

> WRT password cracking - Dan Goodin has a good series of articles on
> password cracking at Ars Technica.
>
> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/how-i-became-a-password-cracker/
>
> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how-crackers-make-minced-meat-out-of-your-passwords/
>
> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/how-the-bible-and-youtube-are-fueling-the-next-frontier-of-password-cracking/
>
> TL;DR - Current GPU-based password cracking using 20-million word
> dictionaries make truly random passwords below 14 characters and nearl all
> pass-phrases susceptible to cracking in a relatively short time.
>
> On a related subject, roughly 75% of websites store passwords as nothing
> more complicated than simple, unsalted MD5 hashes.  This is almost as easy
> to break as as NTLM.
>
> Salt makes the initial crack more difficult, but if the same salt is used
> for all hashes, then subsequent cracks ignore it.
>
> WRT the use of PII - it's sold on various markets, correlated in a "big
> data" manner with other exposures, and, if enough information is available
> and the person's credit score is high enough, is used for credit attacks.
>  In some cases, if banking information is correlated, the collection is
> used for banking attacks.  If there is poor correlation but an email or
> FQDN is in the information, then the data may be used as a target list.
>
> Ray Parks
> Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
> V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
> NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov
> SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder)
> JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder)
>
>
>
> On Nov 18, 2013, at 10:12 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
>
> A forum I belong to has been hacked, including personal info as well as
> passwords.
>
> How do they use this information?
>
> I presume they try the hash function on all combinations of possible
> passwords.  (Naturally optimized for faster convergence).  They see a
> match, i.e. a letter combination resulting in the given hash of the
> password.
>
> If they crack one password, does that make cracking the rest any easier?
>
> And does "salt" simply increase the difficulty, and indeed can it be
> deduced, as above, by cracking a single password?
>
> .. or is it all quite different from this!
>
>-- Owen
>  
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>
>
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Parks, Raymond]

The addition of a salt to a password makes rainbow tables much less effective 
because it makes the table space larger, even trading off chain length for 
convergence.  However, rainbow tables are no longer the thing - with multi-GPU 
setups, password crackers just brute force passwords.  Basically, the sequence 
is:

1. Using a large (20 million word) multiple language (but standard ASCII) 
dictionary derived from text sources across the WWW, hash the words in that 
dictionary with variants (leet-speak, other substitutions, plurals, added 
numbers, 8 for "ate", et cetera), and compare the outputs to the captured 
password file.  Salt is basically a variant that can be accounted for - extra 
random characters.

2.  If some passwords are of the type you dislike, then those can be 
brute-forced almost as fast as rainbow tables can be calculated.  Salt is 
irrelevant in this process, other than making the effective number of bytes 
longer.

In the Ars articles, Step 1 seems to get as much as 90% of self-chosen 
passwords in a matter of hours.  The practitioners in the Ars articles don't go 
on to Step 2, but I would expect that to take less than a week.  If the hash 
algorithm is captured along with the passwords, then the cracker has the 
advantage of knowing whether the web-site uses salt.  Operating systems, of 
course, are studied off-line to determine the algorithm and use of salt.

Ray Parks
Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov
SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder)
JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder)



On Nov 18, 2013, at 11:48 AM, cody dooderson wrote:

> I find passwords really hard to remember. Especially those sites that require 
> numbers, symbols,uppercase, and lower case characters. I personally would 
> rather use a 20 character all lowercase password than an 8 character mixed 
> symbol password. As a result keep a document, in the cloud, with all of my 
> passwords stored in plain text. Many of these passwords I could care less if 
> someone cracked. 
> Also, I was under the impression that salting prevents the use of rainbow 
> tables.
> 
> Cody Smith
> 
> 
> On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 11:28 AM, Parks, Raymond  wrote:
> WRT password cracking - Dan Goodin has a good series of articles on password 
> cracking at Ars Technica.
> 
> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/how-i-became-a-password-cracker/
> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how-crackers-make-minced-meat-out-of-your-passwords/
> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/how-the-bible-and-youtube-are-fueling-the-next-frontier-of-password-cracking/
> 
> TL;DR - Current GPU-based password cracking using 20-million word 
> dictionaries make truly random passwords below 14 characters and nearl all 
> pass-phrases susceptible to cracking in a relatively short time.
> 
> On a related subject, roughly 75% of websites store passwords as nothing more 
> complicated than simple, unsalted MD5 hashes.  This is almost as easy to 
> break as as NTLM.
> 
> Salt makes the initial crack more difficult, but if the same salt is used for 
> all hashes, then subsequent cracks ignore it.
> 
> WRT the use of PII - it's sold on various markets, correlated in a "big data" 
> manner with other exposures, and, if enough information is available and the 
> person's credit score is high enough, is used for credit attacks.  In some 
> cases, if banking information is correlated, the collection is used for 
> banking attacks.  If there is poor correlation but an email or FQDN is in the 
> information, then the data may be used as a target list.
> 
> Ray Parks
> Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
> V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
> NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov
> SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder)
> JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder)
> 
> 
> 
> On Nov 18, 2013, at 10:12 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
> 
>> A forum I belong to has been hacked, including personal info as well as 
>> passwords.
>> 
>> How do they use this information?
>> 
>> I presume they try the hash function on all combinations of possible 
>> passwords.  (Naturally optimized for faster convergence).  They see a match, 
>> i.e. a letter combination resulting in the given hash of the password.
>> 
>> If they crack one password, does that make cracking the rest any easier?
>> 
>> And does "salt" simply increase the difficulty, and indeed can it be 
>> deduced, as above, by cracking a single password?
>> 
>> .. or is it all quite different from this!
>> 
>>-- Owen
>> 
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> 
> 
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at caf

Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Gillian Densmore]

Password cracking?  Hmm- as to how? I can add a little insight into this
one. Password cracking is just one tool. So is knowing week points of the
audiance in the forums,fake, proxy, and redirecting websites just as a few.
This last summer: Live Networks (XBOX live, SkyDrive etc), PSN (the Play
Station Network) Blizzard.com, Battle.net(owned and run blizzard), as well
as G+, All had  Individually, 50K + in SSN, Credit Card Info- three digit
security- among the tropies, its my understanding source code for
Battle.Net, a conservitve net billion of games between Sony, Blizzard, and
Microsft were all stolen in a matter of seconds:

Acording to the group it self (Anonymous) How? Prep, Patiance, fake info,
and  eye for detail when it came to weeknes not in the passwords when
entered where ever there used but in a lots and lots of tools from fake
support pages. Waching how people ask support questions.

All that to say: To the degree technology can make a fancy  key. Thicker
doors, and deeper bunkers. All that will not help as long as there are Sith
out there.


On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 5:16 PM, Parks, Raymond  wrote:

> The addition of a salt to a password makes rainbow tables much less
> effective because it makes the table space larger, even trading off chain
> length for convergence.  However, rainbow tables are no longer the thing -
> with multi-GPU setups, password crackers just brute force passwords.
>  Basically, the sequence is:
>
> 1. Using a large (20 million word) multiple language (but standard ASCII)
> dictionary derived from text sources across the WWW, hash the words in that
> dictionary with variants (leet-speak, other substitutions, plurals, added
> numbers, 8 for "ate", et cetera), and compare the outputs to the captured
> password file.  Salt is basically a variant that can be accounted for -
> extra random characters.
>
> 2.  If some passwords are of the type you dislike, then those can be
> brute-forced almost as fast as rainbow tables can be calculated.  Salt is
> irrelevant in this process, other than making the effective number of bytes
> longer.
>
> In the Ars articles, Step 1 seems to get as much as 90% of self-chosen
> passwords in a matter of hours.  The practitioners in the Ars articles
> don't go on to Step 2, but I would expect that to take less than a week.
>  If the hash algorithm is captured along with the passwords, then the
> cracker has the advantage of knowing whether the web-site uses salt.
>  Operating systems, of course, are studied off-line to determine the
> algorithm and use of salt.
>
> Ray Parks
> Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
> V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
> NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov
> SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder)
> JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder)
>
>
>
> On Nov 18, 2013, at 11:48 AM, cody dooderson wrote:
>
> I find passwords really hard to remember. Especially those sites that
> require numbers, symbols,uppercase, and lower case characters. I personally
> would rather use a 20 character all lowercase 
> passwordthan an 8 
> character mixed symbol password. As a result keep a document, in
> the cloud, with all of my passwords stored in plain text. Many of these
> passwords I could care less if someone cracked.
> Also, I was under the impression that salting prevents the use of rainbow
> tables .
>
> Cody Smith
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 11:28 AM, Parks, Raymond wrote:
>
>> WRT password cracking - Dan Goodin has a good series of articles on
>> password cracking at Ars Technica.
>>
>> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/how-i-became-a-password-cracker/
>>
>> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how-crackers-make-minced-meat-out-of-your-passwords/
>>
>> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/how-the-bible-and-youtube-are-fueling-the-next-frontier-of-password-cracking/
>>
>> TL;DR - Current GPU-based password cracking using 20-million word
>> dictionaries make truly random passwords below 14 characters and nearl all
>> pass-phrases susceptible to cracking in a relatively short time.
>>
>> On a related subject, roughly 75% of websites store passwords as nothing
>> more complicated than simple, unsalted MD5 hashes.  This is almost as easy
>> to break as as NTLM.
>>
>> Salt makes the initial crack more difficult, but if the same salt is used
>> for all hashes, then subsequent cracks ignore it.
>>
>> WRT the use of PII - it's sold on various markets, correlated in a "big
>> data" manner with other exposures, and, if enough information is available
>> and the person's credit score is high enough, is used for credit attacks.
>>  In some cases, if banking information is correlated, the collection is
>> used for banking attacks.  If there is poor correlation but an email or
>> FQDN is in the information, then the data may be used as a target list.
>>
>> Ray Parks
>> Consilient Heuristician/IDART Progr

Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Parks, Raymond]

Exactly.  It's astounding what information critical to the security of computer 
systems can be found through Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT).  The CIA has 
opened an office that does nothing but OSINT.

When we red team (authorized adversary-based assessment for defensive 
purposes), we always start with OSINT.  In the past, I've found all sorts of 
interesting things in open sources.  I found the architecture of a DoD 
defensive system in the Delhi Star, quoted from a speech given by a DoD 
civilian executive.  I found the backup power generation details of a 
government data center in a USA Jobs posting.  I leveraged that with a 
spreadsheet containing the information about contract costs accessible on the 
agency's external web-site.  The cost of the contract with the generator vendor 
told me what services the agency was buying and that the generators "phoned 
home" to the vendor.  Thus I knew that the generators had Internet access.  
I've found the details of control system installations on the web-sites of 
integrators trying to sell their services to other customers (they had 
anonymized some but other details I knew about my target/customer allowed me to 
make the connection).  We found the complete details of all software 
installations, services, and running processes for computers in government 
networks posted on the web in technical support forums.

It is possible to avoid information exposure, but it's not easy and most folks 
simply prefer the convenience of using the WWW and ignore their escaping 
information.

Ray Parks
Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov
SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder)
JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder)



On Nov 18, 2013, at 9:35 PM, Gillian Densmore wrote:

> Password cracking?  Hmm- as to how? I can add a little insight into this one. 
> Password cracking is just one tool. So is knowing week points of the audiance 
> in the forums,fake, proxy, and redirecting websites just as a few. This last 
> summer: Live Networks (XBOX live, SkyDrive etc), PSN (the Play Station 
> Network) Blizzard.com, Battle.net(owned and run blizzard), as well as G+, All 
> had  Individually, 50K + in SSN, Credit Card Info- three digit security- 
> among the tropies, its my understanding source code for Battle.Net, a 
> conservitve net billion of games between Sony, Blizzard, and Microsft were 
> all stolen in a matter of seconds:
> 
> Acording to the group it self (Anonymous) How? Prep, Patiance, fake info, and 
>  eye for detail when it came to weeknes not in the passwords when entered 
> where ever there used but in a lots and lots of tools from fake support 
> pages. Waching how people ask support questions.
> 
> All that to say: To the degree technology can make a fancy  key. Thicker 
> doors, and deeper bunkers. All that will not help as long as there are Sith 
> out there.
> 
> 
> On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 5:16 PM, Parks, Raymond  wrote:
> The addition of a salt to a password makes rainbow tables much less effective 
> because it makes the table space larger, even trading off chain length for 
> convergence.  However, rainbow tables are no longer the thing - with 
> multi-GPU setups, password crackers just brute force passwords.  Basically, 
> the sequence is:
> 
> 1. Using a large (20 million word) multiple language (but standard ASCII) 
> dictionary derived from text sources across the WWW, hash the words in that 
> dictionary with variants (leet-speak, other substitutions, plurals, added 
> numbers, 8 for "ate", et cetera), and compare the outputs to the captured 
> password file.  Salt is basically a variant that can be accounted for - extra 
> random characters.
> 
> 2.  If some passwords are of the type you dislike, then those can be 
> brute-forced almost as fast as rainbow tables can be calculated.  Salt is 
> irrelevant in this process, other than making the effective number of bytes 
> longer.
> 
> In the Ars articles, Step 1 seems to get as much as 90% of self-chosen 
> passwords in a matter of hours.  The practitioners in the Ars articles don't 
> go on to Step 2, but I would expect that to take less than a week.  If the 
> hash algorithm is captured along with the passwords, then the cracker has the 
> advantage of knowing whether the web-site uses salt.  Operating systems, of 
> course, are studied off-line to determine the algorithm and use of salt.
> 
> Ray Parks
> Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
> V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
> NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov
> SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder)
> JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder)
> 
> 
> 
> On Nov 18, 2013, at 11:48 AM, cody dooderson wrote:
> 
>> I find passwords really hard to remember. Especially those sites that 
>> require numbers, symbols,uppercase, and lower case characters. I personally 
>> would rather use a 20 character all lowerc

Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Owen Densmore]

Ray, you'd have a far better take on passwords, and security of all sorts
than most of us, love your input on this.

So here's an observation:

Passwords are Dead.  Just move along and we'll come back with a better
solution after the commercial.


Why?
1 - To be secure, you depend on the ISP to be secure. That's OK, but does
fail often.

2 - Apparently length of passwords is the high order bit for crackibility.
We humans dislike typing 20 character passwords, especially on our phones,
and its extremely likely to be miss-typed at least once, probability of
typo goes up with each keystroke.

3 - We are also instructed to have a different password for each login.
 Humans simply cannot do that, they are limited.  Thus they resort to a
formula like two phrases with a 3-4 character difference in the middle,
with some significance like "azn" or "books" for amazon.

4 - Most ISPs have their own rules for passwords, and likely any formula
will fail on a percentage of them.  Thus a formula will only work part of
the time.  Maybe there is a subset that most ISPs accept?  I found UNM, and
my bank, for example, failed to accept a formula I tried.

5 - This leads to keepass, 1password etc to remember all your passwords for
you.  Silly, but still appears reasonable.  But they typically fail in
certain situations.  Ex: they are designed for browser use so are
plugins/bookmarklets.  But what if you have a phone "app".  Won't work.  So
you have to do stupid tricks to go to the pw app and cut/paste.

6 - The latest trend to improve this is two-fold:
6.1: Reduce number of logins: Use OAuth to have just a few accounts
that are very secure.  As soon as twitter, google, facebook, moz, yahoo,
... and the rest of the "standard ISPs" all have OAuth (or equivalent), and
are used by the vast majority of the other sites (forums, stores, ..) we
have reduced the complexity of the user.  Probably will work with all
non-creditcard sites.
6.2: 2-factor: How make more secure?  So far 2-factor works out pretty
well.  It would require a standard pin generator, google's is pretty
effective.  Have to do this to reduce the pile of silly physical pin
generators.

I'm not sure this will work, its too complicated for most people.  We might
be able to have a single pin dongle for 2-factor, could help.  Thus far
2-factor for me has been the best, and I use that account via OAuth for all
the forums, mail lists etc that accept that.  Even stores as long as they
don't keep the credit card info.

The fallback is a password keeper as mentioned above.  But do you really
want it to keep all your passwords?  You're dead without it (travel etc)
and it simply doesn't work in all situations (apps vs browser) and its a
bit creepy to depend on a computer program for all your security.

Sigh.

   -- Owen

On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 5:16 PM, Parks, Raymond  wrote:
>
>> The addition of a salt to a password makes rainbow tables much less
>> effective because it makes the table space larger, even trading off chain
>> length for convergence.  However, rainbow tables are no longer the thing -
>> with multi-GPU setups, password crackers just brute force passwords.
>>  Basically, the sequence is:
>>
>> 1. Using a large (20 million word) multiple language (but standard ASCII)
>> dictionary derived from text sources across the WWW, hash the words in that
>> dictionary with variants (leet-speak, other substitutions, plurals, added
>> numbers, 8 for "ate", et cetera), and compare the outputs to the captured
>> password file.  Salt is basically a variant that can be accounted for -
>> extra random characters.
>>
>> 2.  If some passwords are of the type you dislike, then those can be
>> brute-forced almost as fast as rainbow tables can be calculated.  Salt is
>> irrelevant in this process, other than making the effective number of bytes
>> longer.
>>
>> In the Ars articles, Step 1 seems to get as much as 90% of self-chosen
>> passwords in a matter of hours.  The practitioners in the Ars articles
>> don't go on to Step 2, but I would expect that to take less than a week.
>>  If the hash algorithm is captured along with the passwords, then the
>> cracker has the advantage of knowing whether the web-site uses salt.
>>  Operating systems, of course, are studied off-line to determine the
>> algorithm and use of salt.
>>
>>  Ray Parks
>> Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
>> V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
>> NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov
>> SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder)
>> JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder)
>>
>>
>>
>> On Nov 18, 2013, at 11:48 AM, cody dooderson wrote:
>>
>> I find passwords really hard to remember. Especially those sites that
>> require numbers, symbols,uppercase, and lower case characters. I personally
>> would rather use a 20 character all lowercase 
>> passwordthan an 8 
>> character mixed symbol password. As a result keep a document, in
>> 

Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Owen Densmore]

As a quick followup:
- I use 1password.  Why?  To collect a list of my logins.  Most of us do
not know half of the logins we have!  This lets me at least spend an
afternoon updating all my passwords if I want to.  1P seems OK and works
well in my ecology.

- I use 2-factor with google and their app.  And if a site lets me login w/
OAuth, I try to use google.  A few more ISPs are using 2-factor and if they
are easy to use, I may try them too.  Main issue is pin; most sms it to you
but dongles abound and I think I'll avoid them.

- Where possible I use pub/priv key crypto.  My hosting service.  My home
computers, servers and NAS, ssh sites.  I wish I could use it on my router,
router attacks are on the rise.

   -- Owen


On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 10:21 AM, Owen Densmore  wrote:

> Ray, you'd have a far better take on passwords, and security of all sorts
> than most of us, love your input on this.
>
> So here's an observation:
>
> Passwords are Dead.  Just move along and we'll come back with a better
> solution after the commercial.
>
>
> Why?
> 1 - To be secure, you depend on the ISP to be secure. That's OK, but does
> fail often.
>
> 2 - Apparently length of passwords is the high order bit for crackibility.
> We humans dislike typing 20 character passwords, especially on our phones,
> and its extremely likely to be miss-typed at least once, probability of
> typo goes up with each keystroke.
>
> 3 - We are also instructed to have a different password for each login.
>  Humans simply cannot do that, they are limited.  Thus they resort to a
> formula like two phrases with a 3-4 character difference in the middle,
> with some significance like "azn" or "books" for amazon.
>
> 4 - Most ISPs have their own rules for passwords, and likely any formula
> will fail on a percentage of them.  Thus a formula will only work part of
> the time.  Maybe there is a subset that most ISPs accept?  I found UNM, and
> my bank, for example, failed to accept a formula I tried.
>
> 5 - This leads to keepass, 1password etc to remember all your passwords
> for you.  Silly, but still appears reasonable.  But they typically fail in
> certain situations.  Ex: they are designed for browser use so are
> plugins/bookmarklets.  But what if you have a phone "app".  Won't work.  So
> you have to do stupid tricks to go to the pw app and cut/paste.
>
> 6 - The latest trend to improve this is two-fold:
> 6.1: Reduce number of logins: Use OAuth to have just a few accounts
> that are very secure.  As soon as twitter, google, facebook, moz, yahoo,
> ... and the rest of the "standard ISPs" all have OAuth (or equivalent), and
> are used by the vast majority of the other sites (forums, stores, ..) we
> have reduced the complexity of the user.  Probably will work with all
> non-creditcard sites.
> 6.2: 2-factor: How make more secure?  So far 2-factor works out pretty
> well.  It would require a standard pin generator, google's is pretty
> effective.  Have to do this to reduce the pile of silly physical pin
> generators.
>
> I'm not sure this will work, its too complicated for most people.  We
> might be able to have a single pin dongle for 2-factor, could help.  Thus
> far 2-factor for me has been the best, and I use that account via OAuth for
> all the forums, mail lists etc that accept that.  Even stores as long as
> they don't keep the credit card info.
>
> The fallback is a password keeper as mentioned above.  But do you really
> want it to keep all your passwords?  You're dead without it (travel etc)
> and it simply doesn't work in all situations (apps vs browser) and its a
> bit creepy to depend on a computer program for all your security.
>
> Sigh.
>
>-- Owen
>
> On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 5:16 PM, Parks, Raymond wrote:
>>
>>> The addition of a salt to a password makes rainbow tables much less
>>> effective because it makes the table space larger, even trading off chain
>>> length for convergence.  However, rainbow tables are no longer the thing -
>>> with multi-GPU setups, password crackers just brute force passwords.
>>>  Basically, the sequence is:
>>>
>>> 1. Using a large (20 million word) multiple language (but standard
>>> ASCII) dictionary derived from text sources across the WWW, hash the words
>>> in that dictionary with variants (leet-speak, other substitutions, plurals,
>>> added numbers, 8 for "ate", et cetera), and compare the outputs to the
>>> captured password file.  Salt is basically a variant that can be accounted
>>> for - extra random characters.
>>>
>>> 2.  If some passwords are of the type you dislike, then those can be
>>> brute-forced almost as fast as rainbow tables can be calculated.  Salt is
>>> irrelevant in this process, other than making the effective number of bytes
>>> longer.
>>>
>>> In the Ars articles, Step 1 seems to get as much as 90% of self-chosen
>>> passwords in a matter of hours.  The practitioners in the Ars articles
>>> don't go on to Step 2, but I would expect that to take less than a week.
>>

Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[cody dooderson]

Now that you mention it I do see a peacock almost ever time I go through
Nambe.

Cody Smith


On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 10:51 AM, Owen Densmore  wrote:

> As a quick followup:
> - I use 1password.  Why?  To collect a list of my logins.  Most of us do
> not know half of the logins we have!  This lets me at least spend an
> afternoon updating all my passwords if I want to.  1P seems OK and works
> well in my ecology.
>
> - I use 2-factor with google and their app.  And if a site lets me login
> w/ OAuth, I try to use google.  A few more ISPs are using 2-factor and if
> they are easy to use, I may try them too.  Main issue is pin; most sms it
> to you but dongles abound and I think I'll avoid them.
>
> - Where possible I use pub/priv key crypto.  My hosting service.  My home
> computers, servers and NAS, ssh sites.  I wish I could use it on my router,
> router attacks are on the rise.
>
>-- Owen
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 10:21 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
>
>> Ray, you'd have a far better take on passwords, and security of all sorts
>> than most of us, love your input on this.
>>
>> So here's an observation:
>>
>> Passwords are Dead.  Just move along and we'll come back with a better
>> solution after the commercial.
>>
>>
>> Why?
>> 1 - To be secure, you depend on the ISP to be secure. That's OK, but does
>> fail often.
>>
>> 2 - Apparently length of passwords is the high order bit for
>> crackibility. We humans dislike typing 20 character passwords, especially
>> on our phones, and its extremely likely to be miss-typed at least once,
>> probability of typo goes up with each keystroke.
>>
>> 3 - We are also instructed to have a different password for each login.
>>  Humans simply cannot do that, they are limited.  Thus they resort to a
>> formula like two phrases with a 3-4 character difference in the middle,
>> with some significance like "azn" or "books" for amazon.
>>
>> 4 - Most ISPs have their own rules for passwords, and likely any formula
>> will fail on a percentage of them.  Thus a formula will only work part of
>> the time.  Maybe there is a subset that most ISPs accept?  I found UNM, and
>> my bank, for example, failed to accept a formula I tried.
>>
>> 5 - This leads to keepass, 1password etc to remember all your passwords
>> for you.  Silly, but still appears reasonable.  But they typically fail in
>> certain situations.  Ex: they are designed for browser use so are
>> plugins/bookmarklets.  But what if you have a phone "app".  Won't work.  So
>> you have to do stupid tricks to go to the pw app and cut/paste.
>>
>> 6 - The latest trend to improve this is two-fold:
>> 6.1: Reduce number of logins: Use OAuth to have just a few accounts
>> that are very secure.  As soon as twitter, google, facebook, moz, yahoo,
>> ... and the rest of the "standard ISPs" all have OAuth (or equivalent), and
>> are used by the vast majority of the other sites (forums, stores, ..) we
>> have reduced the complexity of the user.  Probably will work with all
>> non-creditcard sites.
>> 6.2: 2-factor: How make more secure?  So far 2-factor works out
>> pretty well.  It would require a standard pin generator, google's is pretty
>> effective.  Have to do this to reduce the pile of silly physical pin
>> generators.
>>
>> I'm not sure this will work, its too complicated for most people.  We
>> might be able to have a single pin dongle for 2-factor, could help.  Thus
>> far 2-factor for me has been the best, and I use that account via OAuth for
>> all the forums, mail lists etc that accept that.  Even stores as long as
>> they don't keep the credit card info.
>>
>> The fallback is a password keeper as mentioned above.  But do you really
>> want it to keep all your passwords?  You're dead without it (travel etc)
>> and it simply doesn't work in all situations (apps vs browser) and its a
>> bit creepy to depend on a computer program for all your security.
>>
>> Sigh.
>>
>>-- Owen
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 5:16 PM, Parks, Raymond wrote:
>>>
 The addition of a salt to a password makes rainbow tables much less
 effective because it makes the table space larger, even trading off chain
 length for convergence.  However, rainbow tables are no longer the thing -
 with multi-GPU setups, password crackers just brute force passwords.
  Basically, the sequence is:

 1. Using a large (20 million word) multiple language (but standard
 ASCII) dictionary derived from text sources across the WWW, hash the words
 in that dictionary with variants (leet-speak, other substitutions, plurals,
 added numbers, 8 for "ate", et cetera), and compare the outputs to the
 captured password file.  Salt is basically a variant that can be accounted
 for - extra random characters.

 2.  If some passwords are of the type you dislike, then those can be
 brute-forced almost as fast as rainbow tables can be calculated.  Salt is
 irrelevant in this process, other than making the effectiv

Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Steve Smith]

Owen -

Good observations...



Why?
1 - To be secure, you depend on the ISP to be secure. That's OK, but 
does fail often.
Do you mean the server(s) and intranet of the service being used? Or do 
you mean your (and their) first-mile provider?  If you mean the former, 
any service is only as secure as the one you are entrusting to provide it.
2 - Apparently length of passwords is the high order bit for 
crackibility. We humans dislike typing 20 character passwords, 
especially on our phones, and its extremely likely to be miss-typed at 
least once, probability of typo goes up with each keystroke.
Complexity order M^N goes up faster than N^M for increasing N (the 
length of the string matters more than the size of the alphabet for 
brute-force).  I find long passwords just fine if I have a keyboard.  
Admittedly, my mental password generator is mnemonic, but not 
particularly dictionary-worthy.


3 - We are also instructed to have a different password for each 
login.  Humans simply cannot do that, they are limited.  Thus they 
resort to a formula like two phrases with a 3-4 character difference 
in the middle, with some significance like "azn" or "books" for amazon.
Significance can be metaphorical or appositional too.   In my own case, 
I apply rood concepts (with mangled spelling) to avoid the temptation to 
*ever* share my password or allow it to be stored in clear text..  they 
are just appalling.   I suspect someone has done a study on how much 
complexity using ideosyncratic phonetic spelling variations expands the 
dictionary.  I suppose it does nothing for rainbow table and brute-force 
attacks.  It also gives me a little bit of satisfaction each time I diss 
Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates in street argot not even likely to be 
found on the internet.


4 - Most ISPs have their own rules for passwords, and likely any 
formula will fail on a percentage of them.  Thus a formula will only 
work part of the time.  Maybe there is a subset that most ISPs accept? 
 I found UNM, and my bank, for example, failed to accept a formula I 
tried.
I have backup (back-down) plans for overly restrictive systems... 
especially those that don't like special characters or caps..


5 - This leads to keepass, 1password etc to remember all your 
passwords for you.  Silly, but still appears reasonable.  But they 
typically fail in certain situations.  Ex: they are designed for 
browser use so are plugins/bookmarklets.  But what if you have a phone 
"app".  Won't work.  So you have to do stupid tricks to go to the pw 
app and cut/paste.

Yes, clumsy.


6 - The latest trend to improve this is two-fold:
  6.1: Reduce number of logins: Use OAuth to have just a few accounts 
that are very secure.  As soon as twitter, google, facebook, moz, 
yahoo, ... and the rest of the "standard ISPs" all have OAuth (or 
equivalent), and are used by the vast majority of the other sites 
(forums, stores, ..) we have reduced the complexity of the user. 
 Probably will work with all non-creditcard sites.
I like the convenience but don't like having my eggs in a single 
basket.  I'm giving over to it for "trivial" services... for example, 
AutoCad's 123d products let me defer to Google Login.  Yes, this lets 
the NSA right into my business (where they surely already are anyway) 
and anyone *else* who can hack Google.  I trust Google more than 
Facebook for this.   But I'm not inclined to do this with my Bank, with 
Amazon, etc.
  6.2: 2-factor: How make more secure?  So far 2-factor works out 
pretty well.  It would require a standard pin generator, google's is 
pretty effective.  Have to do this to reduce the pile of silly 
physical pin generators.
Two-factor also implies two of:  "who you are", "what you have", "what 
you know".   So, an ATM card and a PIN or a retinal scan and a PIN are 
better than a password and a PIN.


I'm not sure this will work, its too complicated for most people.  We 
might be able to have a single pin dongle for 2-factor, could help. 
 Thus far 2-factor for me has been the best, and I use that account 
via OAuth for all the forums, mail lists etc that accept that.  Even 
stores as long as they don't keep the credit card info.
LANL (and all of DOE/DOD?) has been using clock-synced CryptoCards for a 
long time (15 years?)... Ray may know more of their potential 
vulnerabilities but for a single two-factor authentication, I think they 
are as good as it gets still?


The fallback is a password keeper as mentioned above.  But do you 
really want it to keep all your passwords?  You're dead without it 
(travel etc) and it simply doesn't work in all situations (apps vs 
browser) and its a bit creepy to depend on a computer program for all 
your security.
I've always felt terribly vulnerable (especially international travel) 
knowing that I was "dead" (in the water) without my ID. And by 
extension, my wallet.  Thus all the shenaniganry of keeping photocopies 
of everything in a separate place from your wallet, etc.


My

Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Steve Smith]

Now that you mention it I do see a peacock almost ever time I go 
through Nambe.


Cody Smith
It's the same one, and he's got his eye on YOU!  Peacocks are almost as 
creepy as clowns.  Remember that next time you go through Nambe.


Stop in and visit Doug... but lock your doors... that Peacock may let 
himself into your back seat!  And don't stop for clown-hitchikers 
either.  They are everywhere once you are attuned to seeing them!



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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Joshua Thorp]

This an interesting if dense approach to doing away with the password:

https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm

a little more high level: http://www.sqrl.pl/


Basically use an app on your phone or desktop to confirm your unique identity 
using a cryptographic signature.  One click login…  No passwords (except to 
access the authentication app… :P ) 

One interesting thing to note about the implementation,  they define a new 
scheme for links sqrl://  that then get registered for the authentication app…  
Interesting approach to define a custom scheme/register app to handle it which 
could be taken advantage in a lot of situations.

—joshua


On Nov 19, 2013, at 10:51 AM, Owen Densmore  wrote:

> As a quick followup:
> - I use 1password.  Why?  To collect a list of my logins.  Most of us do not 
> know half of the logins we have!  This lets me at least spend an afternoon 
> updating all my passwords if I want to.  1P seems OK and works well in my 
> ecology.
> 
> - I use 2-factor with google and their app.  And if a site lets me login w/ 
> OAuth, I try to use google.  A few more ISPs are using 2-factor and if they 
> are easy to use, I may try them too.  Main issue is pin; most sms it to you 
> but dongles abound and I think I'll avoid them.
> 
> - Where possible I use pub/priv key crypto.  My hosting service.  My home 
> computers, servers and NAS, ssh sites.  I wish I could use it on my router, 
> router attacks are on the rise.
> 
>-- Owen
> 
> 
> On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 10:21 AM, Owen Densmore  wrote:
> Ray, you'd have a far better take on passwords, and security of all sorts 
> than most of us, love your input on this.
> 
> So here's an observation: 
> Passwords are Dead.  Just move along and we'll come back with a better 
> solution after the commercial.
> 
> Why?
> 1 - To be secure, you depend on the ISP to be secure. That's OK, but does 
> fail often.
> 
> 2 - Apparently length of passwords is the high order bit for crackibility. We 
> humans dislike typing 20 character passwords, especially on our phones, and 
> its extremely likely to be miss-typed at least once, probability of typo goes 
> up with each keystroke.
> 
> 3 - We are also instructed to have a different password for each login.  
> Humans simply cannot do that, they are limited.  Thus they resort to a 
> formula like two phrases with a 3-4 character difference in the middle, with 
> some significance like "azn" or "books" for amazon.
> 
> 4 - Most ISPs have their own rules for passwords, and likely any formula will 
> fail on a percentage of them.  Thus a formula will only work part of the 
> time.  Maybe there is a subset that most ISPs accept?  I found UNM, and my 
> bank, for example, failed to accept a formula I tried.
> 
> 5 - This leads to keepass, 1password etc to remember all your passwords for 
> you.  Silly, but still appears reasonable.  But they typically fail in 
> certain situations.  Ex: they are designed for browser use so are 
> plugins/bookmarklets.  But what if you have a phone "app".  Won't work.  So 
> you have to do stupid tricks to go to the pw app and cut/paste.
> 
> 6 - The latest trend to improve this is two-fold: 
> 6.1: Reduce number of logins: Use OAuth to have just a few accounts that 
> are very secure.  As soon as twitter, google, facebook, moz, yahoo, ... and 
> the rest of the "standard ISPs" all have OAuth (or equivalent), and are used 
> by the vast majority of the other sites (forums, stores, ..) we have reduced 
> the complexity of the user.  Probably will work with all non-creditcard sites.
> 6.2: 2-factor: How make more secure?  So far 2-factor works out pretty 
> well.  It would require a standard pin generator, google's is pretty 
> effective.  Have to do this to reduce the pile of silly physical pin 
> generators.
> 
> I'm not sure this will work, its too complicated for most people.  We might 
> be able to have a single pin dongle for 2-factor, could help.  Thus far 
> 2-factor for me has been the best, and I use that account via OAuth for all 
> the forums, mail lists etc that accept that.  Even stores as long as they 
> don't keep the credit card info.
> 
> The fallback is a password keeper as mentioned above.  But do you really want 
> it to keep all your passwords?  You're dead without it (travel etc) and it 
> simply doesn't work in all situations (apps vs browser) and its a bit creepy 
> to depend on a computer program for all your security.
> 
> Sigh.
> 
>-- Owen
> 
> On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 5:16 PM, Parks, Raymond  wrote:
> The addition of a salt to a password makes rainbow tables much less effective 
> because it makes the table space larger, even trading off chain length for 
> convergence.  However, rainbow tables are no longer the thing - with 
> multi-GPU setups, password crackers just brute force passwords.  Basically, 
> the sequence is:
> 
> 1. Using a large (20 million word) multiple language (but standard ASCII) 
> dictionary derived from text sources across the

Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Barry MacKichan]

You have found the weakest point in programs like 1PassWord. In the last few 
weeks, though, some things have come out to ameliorate the situation.

1. Apple now has its iCloud keychain, which means for a certain class of 
secrets, web passwords and credit card numbers, you can have automatic pasting 
on OS/X and IOS. The password for your keychain defaults to your logon password 
in OS/X, but it can be changed.

2. 1PassWord on the Mac now has a menu-bar widget that makes the cut and paste 
much more convenient.

—Barry


On Nov 19, 2013, at 10:21 AM, Owen Densmore  wrote:

> 5 - This leads to keepass, 1password etc to remember all your passwords for 
> you.  Silly, but still appears reasonable.  But they typically fail in 
> certain situations.  Ex: they are designed for browser use so are 
> plugins/bookmarklets.  But what if you have a phone "app".  Won't work.  So 
> you have to do stupid tricks to go to the pw app and cut/paste.
> 
> The fallback is a password keeper as mentioned above.  But do you really want 
> it to keep all your passwords?  

I do. Remembering several hundred secure passwords isn’t an option.

> You're dead without it (travel etc) and it simply doesn't work in all 
> situations (apps vs browser)

My experience is that it works everywhere; the only question is how convenient 
is it. I think I had to write a password on a piece of paper once in the last 3 
years — I don’t recall why I had to do it.

> and its a bit creepy to depend on a computer program for all your security.

We wouldn’t have to if the hackers didn’t have computers.


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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[glen]

On 11/18/2013 08:35 PM, Gillian Densmore wrote:
> Password cracking?  Hmm- as to how? I can add a little insight into this
> one. Password cracking is just one tool.

You can always just _ask_ for their passwords, too! ;-)

Exclusive: Snowden persuaded other NSA workers to give up passwords -
sources
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/08/net-us-usa-security-snowden-idUSBRE9A703020131108


-- 
⇒⇐ glen


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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Steve Smith]

On 11/18/2013 08:35 PM, Gillian Densmore wrote:

Password cracking?  Hmm- as to how? I can add a little insight into this
one. Password cracking is just one tool.

You can always just _ask_ for their passwords, too! ;-)

Exclusive: Snowden persuaded other NSA workers to give up passwords -
sources
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/08/net-us-usa-security-snowden-idUSBRE9A703020131108
During the worst of the Wen Ho Lee experience 15 years ago, I had at 
least one person who should definitely have known better ask me for my 
*classified* password on the phone (intra-laboratory) to avoid waiting 
for me to come take care of something for him (15 min walk).  This is 
someone who had even been yanked out of bed at midnight by the FBI for a 
polygraph under bright lights (yes, they did use blanket harrassment 
techniques during that period for people *not* directly related to or 
implicated in Wen Ho's folly).


I had already decided to make my passwords so vile that nobody besides 
me would be able to stomach typing them, but in this case we were stuck 
with computer generated ones (refreshed regularly) and had not yet been 
set up with CryptoCards.   The two-factor (crypto (have) + pin (know)) 
system meant that I couldn't have shared my login credentials with him 
if my life depended on it (excepting if he already had MY cryptocard in 
his posession).   If he had pulled rank on me (which was his style and 
he did have lots of rank) I would have spelled out one of my disgusting 
style ("e8sh@tMo%fo!") and let him try it a few times until he gave up 
and either realized I was sh@tting him around  or just gave up and 
waited for me to come and do it correctly.


- Steve



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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Arlo Barnes]

>
> CryptoCards

Anything like a SecurID?

>From Kevin Mitnick's autobiography
excerptedon Google
Books:
 [image: Inline image 1]
[image: Inline image 2]
-Arlo James Barnes

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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Marcus G. Daniels]

On 12/18/13, 11:13 AM, Arlo Barnes wrote:


CryptoCards

Anything like a SecurID?
Organizations that use SecurID may prepend or append a password to a 
token provided by a device.  The token changes every few seconds.


CryptoCards (the brand) are different in that the password is set when 
the device is issued.
That way there is less opportunity to intercept the password part. One 
plus of SecurID is that they are small enough to carry on a keyring.  
CryptoCards are like thick credit cards -- too thick to put in a wallet, 
really.


Marcus

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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Owen Densmore]

[a bit late, but...] These are *great* sites, thanks!  Fascinating read
about becoming a cracker-for-a-day! It might be worth trying that for
ourselves just to understand what we're up against.  I just had my twitter
account apparently hacked so got pretty interested in this.

Bruce Schneier's advice:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/03/choosing_secure_1.html

So if you want your password to be hard to guess, you should choose
something that this process will miss. My advice is to take a sentence and
turn it into a password. Something like "This little piggy went to market"
might become "tlpWENT2m". That nine-character password won't be in anyone's
dictionary. Of course, don't use this one, because I've written about it.
Choose your own sentence -- something personal.


I thought about this independently (or remembered it!) and started thinking
about sentences and taking the first letter of each word: Star Spangled
Banner: oskysbtdel .. then adding other stuff that is unique per site and
fulfills n-Caps, n-Specials, etc silly rules. Since many hacks are
dictionary based (this means you XKCD), this avoids words completely.  Pub
tunes and chanties are great for this! Or favorite poems.

This is still somewhat low on the PW Hygiene scale, I bet, but still .. I'd
like to not have a PW mgr be the only one knowing the unique passwords, so
wanted a formula of my own, one I can remember for every site.

So questions:
- How many of us are now using completely random pw's generated by one of
the pw managers?
- Is sentence based stunts close to "random"?
- Wouldn't unicode help here? 16 bit characters would definitely bother the
crackers, right?

And we should remember, the massive hacks are only for sites that have
gotten an encrypted pw file and know a lot about it like what crypto it
uses etc.  The high order bit here is quick notification by compromised
sites.

   -- Owen


On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 11:28 AM, Parks, Raymond  wrote:

> WRT password cracking - Dan Goodin has a good series of articles on
> password cracking at Ars Technica.
>
> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/how-i-became-a-password-cracker/
>
> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how-crackers-make-minced-meat-out-of-your-passwords/
>
> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/how-the-bible-and-youtube-are-fueling-the-next-frontier-of-password-cracking/
>
> TL;DR - Current GPU-based password cracking using 20-million word
> dictionaries make truly random passwords below 14 characters and nearl all
> pass-phrases susceptible to cracking in a relatively short time.
>
> On a related subject, roughly 75% of websites store passwords as nothing
> more complicated than simple, unsalted MD5 hashes.  This is almost as easy
> to break as as NTLM.
>
> Salt makes the initial crack more difficult, but if the same salt is used
> for all hashes, then subsequent cracks ignore it.
>
> WRT the use of PII - it's sold on various markets, correlated in a "big
> data" manner with other exposures, and, if enough information is available
> and the person's credit score is high enough, is used for credit attacks.
> In some cases, if banking information is correlated, the collection is used
> for banking attacks.  If there is poor correlation but an email or FQDN is
> in the information, then the data may be used as a target list.
>
> Ray Parks
> Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
> V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
> NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov
> SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder)
> JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder)
>
>
>
> On Nov 18, 2013, at 10:12 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
>
> A forum I belong to has been hacked, including personal info as well as
> passwords.
>
> How do they use this information?
>
> I presume they try the hash function on all combinations of possible
> passwords.  (Naturally optimized for faster convergence).  They see a
> match, i.e. a letter combination resulting in the given hash of the
> password.
>
> If they crack one password, does that make cracking the rest any easier?
>
> And does "salt" simply increase the difficulty, and indeed can it be
> deduced, as above, by cracking a single password?
>
> .. or is it all quite different from this!
>
>-- Owen
>  
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>
>
>
> 
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> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>

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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Marcus G. Daniels]

 

TL;DR - Current GPU-based password cracking using 20-million word dictionaries 
make truly random passwords below 14 characters and nearl all pass-phrases 
susceptible to cracking in a relatively short time.

 

 

There are an increasing variety of cryptographic algorithms being developed 
under the auspices of altcoin cryptocurrency mining.Hardware that can do 1 
trillion hashes a second for just a few hundred watts and less than $1000.
There’s hardware SSL capabilities on systems like Sparc T4s (for secure 
webservers).   And then there’s OpenCL to FPGAs for special cases.   Pretty 
much hopeless I think. 

 

Marcus


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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Barry MacKichan]

For what it's worth, here are my answers:
1. I use 1Password on the Mac, Windows, and IOS, which is currently all 
the computers I use. The passwords it generates for me are currently 20 
characters including upper and lower case, digits, punctuation, and 
symbols. I never (well, hardly ever) have to enter one by hand, so I 
don't mind using ambiguous characters (1, l, I, 0, O). They are not 
limited to 20 characters, but that seemed enough to me. The only problem 
is sites that put a low limit on the number of characters in a password 
(!!!)
2. The character distribution in the 'sentence-based stunts' is probably 
like the character distribution in English -- the etaoinshrdlu 
distribution. Since some characters may be more or less likely as word 
starters, the entropy might be even less than in English, so I don't 
consider it random.
3. I've considered putting some unicode characters in my 1Password 
master password, but I haven't checked to see that I can enter them in a 
password field on all the platforms I use. I would expect that unicode 
in a password field is represented as UTF8, so that making a single 
character unicode would add only one, maybe two, bytes to the password, 
rather than doubling the length. Making some of the characters ≥ 128 
and < 256 would change the number of combinations that need to be 
checked from 128^n to 256^n; i.e., it would multiply it by 2^n, but this 
could also be done by adding a few more characters. Using UTF8 unicode 
would also put in high bytes.


The XKCD method is not bad. The fact that the component parts are words 
is not fatal. With the DICE method, you pick words at random from a 
dictionary of about 7000 words. Brute force cracking a five-word 
password requires 7000^5 tries, and then you can change the 
capitalization, use a variety of symbols between the words, etc. to 
increase the number. If someone tries to crack my 1Password vault, they 
don't have a hashed password, so they need to feed each password to 
1Password, which uses PBKDF to slow down the process. With current 
hardware the time to crack my vault is over 100,000 years; I forget the 
exact number. When hardware improves, I'll add another word to the 
password.


For passwords I must remember (logon, Apple ID, dropbox) I use a program 
written by a friend which produces 11-character pronounceable 
pseudo-words. Dropbox has a shorter password so I can get to the 
1Password vault it contains in the case of disaster.


—Barry



On 28 Jan 2015, at 21:25, Owen Densmore wrote:


So questions:
- How many of us are now using completely random pw's generated by one 
of the pw managers?

- Is sentence based stunts close to "random"?
- Wouldn't unicode help here? 16 bit characters would definitely 
bother the crackers, right?



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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Owen Densmore]

Great info, thanks!  Do you recall how many logins you have?  And how did
you use 1P to retroactively change/evolve to their system? And for "apps" I
presume you use copy/paste?

Boy wouldn't it be great if they invented a way to *change* the passwords
that they manage easily?

   -- Owen

On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 9:40 AM, Barry MacKichan <
barry.mackic...@mackichan.com> wrote:

> For what it's worth, here are my answers:
> 1. I use 1Password on the Mac, Windows, and IOS, which is currently all
> the computers I use. The passwords it generates for me are currently 20
> characters including upper and lower case, digits, punctuation, and
> symbols. I never (well, hardly ever) have to enter one by hand, so I don't
> mind using ambiguous characters (1, l, I, 0, O). They are not limited to 20
> characters, but that seemed enough to me. The only problem is sites that
> put a low limit on the number of characters in a password (!!!)
> 2. The character distribution in the 'sentence-based stunts' is probably
> like the character distribution in English -- the etaoinshrdlu
> distribution. Since some characters may be more or less likely as word
> starters, the entropy might be even less than in English, so I don't
> consider it random.
> 3. I've considered putting some unicode characters in my 1Password master
> password, but I haven't checked to see that I can enter them in a password
> field on all the platforms I use. I would expect that unicode in a password
> field is represented as UTF8, so that making a single character unicode
> would add only one, maybe two, bytes to the password, rather than doubling
> the length. Making some of the characters ≥ 128 and < 256 would change the
> number of combinations that need to be checked from 128^n to 256^n; i.e.,
> it would multiply it by 2^n, but this could also be done by adding a few
> more characters. Using UTF8 unicode would also put in high bytes.
>
> The XKCD method is not bad. The fact that the component parts are words is
> not fatal. With the DICE method, you pick words at random from a dictionary
> of about 7000 words. Brute force cracking a five-word password requires
> 7000^5 tries, and then you can change the capitalization, use a variety of
> symbols between the words, etc. to increase the number. If someone tries to
> crack my 1Password vault, they don't have a hashed password, so they need
> to feed each password to 1Password, which uses PBKDF to slow down the
> process. With current hardware the time to crack my vault is over 100,000
> years; I forget the exact number. When hardware improves, I'll add another
> word to the password.
>
> For passwords I must remember (logon, Apple ID, dropbox) I use a program
> written by a friend which produces 11-character pronounceable pseudo-words.
> Dropbox has a shorter password so I can get to the 1Password vault it
> contains in the case of disaster.
>
> —Barry
>
>
>
> On 28 Jan 2015, at 21:25, Owen Densmore wrote:
>
>  So questions:
>> - How many of us are now using completely random pw's generated by one of
>> the pw managers?
>> - Is sentence based stunts close to "random"?
>> - Wouldn't unicode help here? 16 bit characters would definitely bother
>> the crackers, right?
>>
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>

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Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Forum hacked

[Arlo Barnes]

What would really help is websites publishing a file that can be found in
an automated way (perhaps, like robots.txt, it is standardly named at the
root) that defines what areas of the site require what type of login (for
example, it could say that forums.foobricks.ninja requires an OpenID, and
then a browser can, if the user wants it that way, automatically log in
using a preferred OpenID registered with the browser; and if the file says
that demos.foobricks.ninja needs a SceneID , then
the browser can log in with that). This would aid multiple-login schemes,
since the user would not have to deal with the confounding detail of
treating each site like an unrelated login system. As usual, there are
attacks based on this that would have to be defended against.
Part of this file could give the restrictions on the password (of course,
the less the better, for the most part) - perhaps as a regex. But it is
important that it be machine-readable, this will help a password keeper
application to generate better random passwords, and be able to check
whether a user-saved password would be valid as often as it wants, offline.
I think XML would be ideal for such a file, but it could be in any standard
format.

Of course, for sites with poor security, this will *help* rather than
ultimately hinder the attackers, but only because of security through
obscurity.

-Arlo James Barnes

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