Pingdom is storing passwords in plaintext

http://seldo.tumblr.com/post/8698245004/dear-pingdom-you-should-not-be-storing-my

by seldo • 15 years ago

141 120 15 years ago

seldo.tumblr.com

ddlatham3• 15 years ago

They are not necessarily storing the password in plaintext. However, they are:

1. Storing it in a recoverable format, instead of a format that only allows verification.

2. Emailing them in plain text.

Both of which are bad.

shubber2• 15 years ago

Just to be clear: there is no significant difference between either of these and simply storing in plaintext.

"In a recoverable form" means that a) there's a single key with which to decrypt the passwords. If I can get the password list, the key isn't far away. And it might not be worth the effort to track it down, since it's practically equivalent to have the (two-way) encrypted passwords and to have the plaintext.

viraptor• 15 years ago

Playing devil's advocate, but this still prevents lots of web-based attacks. Provided you store the encryption key on the filesystem, or in memory and the encrypted passwords in the database usually you'll get access to only one part.

But it gets better! If you have access to the encrypted passwords, but not the key, then they're safer than hashes, since the attacker cannot try to bruteforce them (he could try bruteforcing a very very long encryption key of course...)

pbreit2• 15 years ago

Yes, there is.

In most companies, the database is significantly more accessible than any encryption keys. For goodness sake, marketers typically have query access to the DB.

And the issue of emailing a password is different. The problem there is that if I gain access to your email account, I can quickly search "password" to discover your private passwords that a company, not you, chose to drop into your email account.

But to be clear, user-created passwords should be stored one-way hashed and never emailed.

desigooner2• 15 years ago

I had to ask this as I am dealing with a DotNetNuke based system right now which stores authentication details in a table (aspnet_membership) with the passwords encrypted with a private key (in web.config in IIS) and a password salt.

How would one go about securing such a system where there is no option but storing encrypted passwords that are reversible?!

coin3• 15 years ago

> If I can get the password list, the key isn't far away.

What makes you think the key isn't far away?

ajross• 15 years ago

Recoverable passwords are what everyone means when they say "plaintext". You're positing a distinction that doesn't exist.

ddlatham3• 15 years ago

That's not true. Some people say "We keep your password encrypted" instead of in plaintext, and make the dubious claim that they are then safe. It's good to help them understand the distinction that even if the passwords are encrypted, it's still a problem if they are recoverable.

ceejayoz10• 15 years ago

There's absolutely a distinction. Reversibly encrypted passwords aren't ideal, but it does at least make a database dump less useful to someone who manages a SQL injection exploit.

hackinthebochs• 15 years ago

What exactly is the reason emailing the password is bad (ignoring the plain-text-in-database issue)?

bricestacey• 15 years ago

Email is traditionally transferred using unencrypted connections. Once in your mailbox, email is often saved and/or indexed for easy search, which is often unencrypted and/or outright unprotected. And worse, your email provider can discover your password by simply signing in as you.

ceejayoz10• 15 years ago

I once opened a password reset e-mail from my (former) bank while at work and wasn't hugely pleased to see my password pop up in plain view for a coworker to see.

parfe• 15 years ago

Lets say you want to give the user a 1 step process to get back into their account.

You can 1) Email the password or 2) Email a unique link which lets them reset the password for their account.

If you do #1 the person likely used that password on other accounts. Now you've not only compromised access to your service, but any other that has the same password.

IF you do #2 the user sets a new password and gets into his account. No record of the new password is left anywhere. An attacker with access to the email account can still compromise your service, but now he has no idea what the old password was.

tlianza• 15 years ago

> 2. Emailing them in plain text.

Even if the password were irreversibly encrypted, if I can read your e-mail, I can still access your account in most systems. I can reset your password, and either follow the link they e-mail you, or see the random password they generated for you.

I think #2 is more on you for accessing your e-mail securely, and less on Pingdom. Pingdom is only saving a hacker a little bit of time.

funkah• 15 years ago

Emailing the password is bad and they should stop, but where is the evidence that they are storing the password in plaintext?

dpark8• 15 years ago

The fact that they sent it in an email in response to a user request means that they are at least storing it in a reversible format. Given that they sent the password in plaintext via email, I see no reason to believe they are competent enough to set up a reversible system that is more secure than plaintext (e.g. rot13 isn't more secure but isn't technically plaintext; storing an encrypted password with the key isn't more secure). In all likelihood, they are storing in plaintext or an equivalent.

coin3• 15 years ago

reversible != plaintext

webignition• 15 years ago

The story only details the sending of a password in plain text. You are right in that this provides no evidence of the password being stored in plain text.

It is equally plausible, without further evidence, that pingdom is merely changing the password (a likely case if the password is not retrievable) and emailing the new password.

I tested this with my pingdom account for which I know the password. The email I received contained my password and not a new password. This confirms that pingdom is storing passwords in a retrievable fashion, whether that be plain text or some form of non-one way encryption.

16s2• 15 years ago

It's not inherently bad. It's a trade-off between security and convenience. Believe it or not, most of the time, business managers are far more concerned about the user experience and the convenience of use rather than information security.

It's not black and white. It's a decision with trade-offs either way.

tbeseda• 15 years ago

You can remove your account from the Subscription page of your account.

fourk4• 15 years ago

Is there any guarantee that this actually entirely removes your data from their databases? How do you know they don't just toggle an `active` column for your row in the users table?

bdhe• 15 years ago

Obligatory link for those who haven't seen it before but want to know the right way to do it. http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/

delano2• 15 years ago

We implemented this (bcrypt) for https://www.blamestella.com/ (a web monitoring service for devs and designers)

rwolf• 15 years ago

Your use of the word "implemented" gives me pause. I hope you mean "We've plugged the standard bcrypt library into our web app." and not "We found a pdf describing bcrypt on the internet and one of our 'rockstar ninja warlock' devs stayed up for a week writing an implementation that no one else is using and no one has reviewed."

hm2k• 15 years ago

Your bank stores passwords in plain text, but then they never email it to you.

feydr• 15 years ago

some do like discover.com (unfortuantely) truncates your password at 8 characters, downcases, and sends you in plain txt email

gst2• 15 years ago

That's what I don't understand about banks.

On 99% of all websites I can use special characters in my passwords. The only exception are my online banking sites, where I'm forced to restrict myself to [\d\w] one one of the sites and to [\d] on the other site.

fourk4• 15 years ago

It would be nice if there existed a browser extension that would warn the user anytime they are about to register on a site with password storage issues like this. Of course, there would need to be some sort of community maintained repository for tracking which sites are doing this.

gst2• 15 years ago

Why should it warn the user?

Either the user is using the same password on multiple sites. Then this would be a real security issue, independent of the fact if some of the sites store the password in plaintext.

Or the user is using different passwords for different sites. Then you don't really need to care how a single site handles your password.

fourk4• 15 years ago

If every user used different passwords on every single site, this submission would be hardly newsworthy and barely discussion worthy. In a perfect world, sure, every user would have a unique 14+ character password for every site they register on. In a perfect world, every site would implement basic password encryption. Unfortunately, reality != perfect world.

axomhacker• 15 years ago

Or... The user usually uses the same password, but seeing this warning and gets alarmed, making him use a different password or not use the service.

I love this idea!

ddlatham3• 15 years ago

One reason is that if they are storing the password in a recoverable format, it tells you something about how much you can trust the security of that site in other ways. Even if you're using a different password, you may be much more hesitant about what other information you are willing to put into a site that doesn't take security seriously.

srl• 15 years ago

Either the user is using the same password on multiple sites. Then this would be a real security issue, independent of the fact if some of the sites store the password in plaintext.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of users do - and that's unlikely to change in the near future. It's just too easy.

Many users (the majority? I've seen no statistics for this, but everybody I know falls into this group) do, however, keep several passwords, and assign them to sites based on a combination of 1) how likely the site is to compromise the password (sites that email out plaintext score very poorly) and 2) how much the user cares about the security of that particular account. Which suggests the following use case for fourk's hypothetical plugin: user wants to know what password to use, sees that fooneti.cs is one of those sites that stores easily recoverable passwords, and chooses to use one of the disposable ones.

dpark8• 15 years ago

Because it's poor security, and the user might care. I don't want to use a site that is so lax about security that they store passwords in plaintext. I don't want them to have any of my information, because they're clearly not competent enough to keep it secure. Whether I'm reusing passwords is irrelevant here.

Also, it's a fact that a lot of users reuse passwords. Pretending that it's not the case or claiming that it's the wrong thing to do is pointless. Good security should address the real world, not some silly idealized one.

pavel_lishin• 15 years ago

> Then you don't really need to care how a single site handles your password.

Sure, but if I'm choosing between two sites that offer a similar service, knowing that one is insecure is going to strongly influence me to use the other. It's information that's worth having.

Although, this brings up a point - if the list is crowdsourced, companies may have incentives to report their competitors are insecure. There would have to be some way of erasing "insecure!" votes - but then you end up relying on a (hopefully benevolent) dictator.

What's a good solution? pg can't be everywhere at once!

theBobMcCormick2• 15 years ago

If a site is storing their passwords in plain text, it's a good indicator that they are either:

A) Incompetent B) Don't give a shit about their users data privacy C) Both of the above.

joblessjunkie• 15 years ago

If the site has control over my money or my public persona, then I very much need to care how they handle my password.

It is not uncommon for databases to be stolen via lost laptops, human error, or sloppy security. When this happens, I would prefer that the database not contain my plaintext password.

If someone obtains my password through such a leak, it won't help me that I've used a distinct password for that website.

It's bad news when a bank leaks their customer list. It's catastrophic news when a bank leaks their customer passwords.

If you don't store the passwords in the first place, they can't be leaked.

simonbrown• 15 years ago

There is one for Chrome.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ockgeenjbijlgilppf...

juiceandjuice2• 15 years ago

Also...

Equifax also stores your password in plain text.

cpeterso3• 15 years ago

[citation needed]

juiceandjuice2• 15 years ago

I hope it wasn't you that downvoted me.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2865719

You'll have to take my word I think though... the password blacked out is my password.

BrandonDC2• 15 years ago

Password security is a shared responsibility between the company storing the password and the user who chooses what password to store. As a user, you rarely know the full extent to how a company manages the storage of passwords so the responsibility truly rests on your shoulders to choose unique passwords for each service that you use.

dpark8• 15 years ago

This is simply not realistic. I've got hundreds of accounts online. I cannot remember a truly unique password for each. It's not possible (not for me at least). I can't even remember all the sites I've got accounts.

A lot of people implement their own hash ("I use a base password plus the second letter of the url and the number of letters in the domain: dumbe18"), but this is not unique per site, and these hashing schemes don't tend to be as unique or as hard to figure out as one might imagine.

There are utilities now that try to help, but I've not found one that's even remotely convenient when it comes to accessing sites on multiple computers, my phone, and my tablet. Not to mention I'm putting my trust in a 3rd party to handle all of my passwords when I do this.

BrandonDC2• 15 years ago

Personally, I think it's more realistic to place your trust in one verifiable source (i.e. using the cross-platform KeePass with the encrypted database stored on Dropbox) than assume that "hundreds" of different organizations are all going to implement adequate authentication strategies.

What seems oddly unrealistic to me is that if one company exposes your password, you now have to not only remember all of the hundreds of sites you have accounts on, but log in to each one and change that one password that you always use.

cpeterso3• 15 years ago

I use the SuperGenPass Password Generator bookmarklet. It generates site-specific passwords by hashing the site's domain name with your master password. You can save bookmarklet offline or host in on your own web server so you can generate passwords when you are away from your home computer.

http://supergenpass.com/

The only problem is when SuperGenPass's generated passwords are not compatible with some site's unusual password restrictions. They I have write down a one-off password. A cool idea: a password generator bookmarklet that knows the site-specific password formats. The formats could be extensible (by bookmarklet developer and end users), analyze HTML5 form validation rules, or websites could publish a machine-readable password description microformat.

ErikRogneby2• 15 years ago

I'd like to see these questions added standard to VC pitch meetings:

1)How do you store passwords in your datastore? plaintext?

2)When users login to your service and provide their credentials is it over SSL?

fourk4• 15 years ago

I'd be interested in seeing the correlation between return on investment and level of basic security-related competence at the point at which the company first attempted to raise VC money.

tptacek10• 15 years ago

It's probably negative. A dollar spent on security is a dollar not spent on customer acquisition. Don't put security in your slide deck.

ErikRogneby2• 15 years ago

crunchbase has a nice list of competitors: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pingdom Watchmouse appears to have some pretty high end customers. (including twitter, AT&T and verisign )

jfong• 15 years ago

This probably happens more than we think.

ck2• 15 years ago

One of many that might surprise you: http://plaintextoffenders.com

coin3• 15 years ago

How do you know the "offenders" are storing in plaintext?

johnx123-up• 15 years ago

The detection process is somewhat wrong. In many sites, they store passwords in plaintext or reversible plaintext--but they send mere link to reset. So, you don't really know, how they're storing. IMHO, most of new startups store passwords for the sake of learning. Definitely, there needs to be some disclosure on how they'll store passwords.

IgorPartola2• 15 years ago

Shameless plug/seizing the moment: Ping Brigade (https://www.pingbrigade.com/) does everything over HTTPS, stores passwords using bcrypt and never emails them to you.

Moreover, because I really love HN, I'm going to run a 50% off discount at https://www.pingbrigade.com/signup/hn.

Edit: Wow, that was a quick downvote. Just wondering since when is building a better product than the giant of the industry and showing it off on HN compels people to click the downvote button?

decadentcactus• 15 years ago

I think some will consider it a _bit_ unnecessary. I upvoted you, gotta seize those moments when they come :)

IgorPartola2• 15 years ago

Thank you :)

cookiecaper2• 15 years ago

I think it's cool. People are silly. Don't be afraid to leave messages like this where relevant.

lurkinggrue• 15 years ago

They brute force attack your password hash and then mail it to you.

drewjoh• 15 years ago

LiquidWeb also does this from my experience. Sign-up for a new account and have them call you for verification. Their verification question is "What is your password?".

cookiecaper2• 15 years ago

As we see from this thread, people really need to stop assuming that a site will store their password securely. Find a system that allows you to use a unique, random password for each site and use that instead. Do not trust any site to store your password in a secure fashion as relatively few actually do. If someone can get into the password database on a site, it probably doesn't matter if they have your password or not, because they can usually still access everything directly anyway by looking up your user id and performing the relevant queries.

The danger in plaintext storage is that your password to other valuable sites may be exposed by a leaked database dump or similar. This is not a concern if you use a randomly-generated unique password for each site you visit.

Everything is just much safer this way. With some companies making kind of legitimate arguments for plaintext password storage, just assume that your password is NEVER secret to the admins of a site or anyone who may break in and steal their information. Things would be much nicer for everyone involved if we did this.

There are systems in place that make this pretty easy. Personally I use a home-grown method: pwgen -c xx, copy and paste the coolest-looking password displayed, email to myself encrypted, and decrypt with my secret key and copy and paste any time I want to use a site. There are also things like LastPass, KeePass, websites that generate hashes of passwords salted with another phrase or target site URL (copy and paste final output), websites that output a simple character lookup table based on a user phrase, etc. I believe that an interested party could make one of these things work well enough for use among the general people (especially with automated sync platforms from Google and Mozilla). We need to stop relying on anonymous third parties for our personal safety.

joelmama• 15 years ago

You are right. But again, speaking about Pingdom...they are monitoring company...if they treat our password in that way, how do they treat our other private data...We are putting there our http passwords, right? This is a good way to find out if you should really use some service, or not.

16s2• 15 years ago

I encourage people to use SHA1_Pass. I wrote it and provide full source code under the GPL license. It's free as in freedom and beer. I use it because (as you stated) sites don't do the right thing and have other priorities.

As conscientious users and devs, we have to take matters into our own hands.

j15e• 15 years ago

Told you so a year ago : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1118012

Pingdom is storing passwords in plaintext

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