The Gawker hack: how a million passwords were lost

http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2010/12/15/the-gawker-hack-how-a-million-passwords-were-lost/

by bluesmoon • 16 years ago

39 17 16 years ago

lightbluetouchpaper.org

badwetter• 16 years ago

Pretty good analysis. Thanks for the post. Why these sites don't use OpenAuth is beyond me.

darrylb42• 16 years ago

I think Gawker is older then OpenAuth.

streety3• 16 years ago

Does anyone have more information on the following:

"Second, the salts are only 12 bits. A proper implementation would use salts twice as large as the logarithm of the number of passwords which could ever be stored, forcing the attacker to break accounts one-by-one (64 bits would be a reasonable size to support the entire population of the Earth)."

I haven't come across a formal rule for salt length before and a search for more information didn't turn up much more than the rules of thumb I've seen previously.

mjschultz• 16 years ago

I can't explain why double the logarithm of the number of passwords stored would be the target. But it does make sense to have at least log_2(n) salts for n passwords. That would guarantee each password, even if they were all identical, would have a unique salt making every password hash differently (at least theoretically).

Now perhaps you would double that as a just-in-case scenario or because there is some fundamental property of every (existing or future) hash algorithm that causes a collision half the time (i.e. both salt 10001 and salt 10000 generate the same hash value).

by3• 16 years ago

It's called the Birthday Paradox

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Birthday_para...

the rule of thumb to remember is that there is a 50% chance of a collision when the sample size reaches half the bits of the total available.

ZoFreX2• 16 years ago

Would you really care about a single hash collision in a database of 500,000 users?

streety3• 16 years ago

I had heard of the Birthday paradox previously but didn't make the connection. Thanks for the reply.

vinhboy• 16 years ago

Can someone explain to me how they salted the password? From the db dump, I only saw one encrypted string. In a regular salt/hash situation, you have two encrypted strings.

streety3• 16 years ago

My understanding was that the first two characters of the hash were the salt.

Also, encryption implies decryption which isn't possible here, apart from brute forcing. What's being done here, albeit badly, is hashing.</pedantry>

chopsueyar3• 16 years ago

Waiting for the 37signals blog response...

chopsueyar3• 16 years ago

Perhaps Firesheep was used?

chopsueyar3• 16 years ago

Interesting statistic on Facebook Connect versus standard accounts.

Anyone else care to comment if you see the same ratio?

The Gawker hack: how a million passwords were lost

Related Stories