Plain-Text Offenders Hits 1000

http://plaintextoffenders.com/post/39913712222/1000-posts

by omervk • 14 years ago

28 56 14 years ago

omervk7• 14 years ago

Omer here, one of the two guys behind this website. I'd like to thank the Hacker News community, who are in part the reason for our site's popularity. Thanks, everyone. Please keep spreading the word! :)

marshray15• 14 years ago

Since we have an interesting discussion going on, would you care to share a bit about the methodology?

How do you determine by external observation that a site's password handling is sufficiently bad to merit the Plain Text Offender title?

omervk7• 14 years ago

It depends on the evidence the submitters send us. If it's a Forgot Password or Password Reminder (or sometimes being told what your password is by a CS rep), that's evidence enough. We also allow for Here Are Your Details emails after registration as evidence, though the probability is small that passwords are stored in plaintext/reversible encryption (but we still believe it's an offense since the password is both sent over an insecure medium and is stored on the email server).

laurent1234563• 14 years ago

I wonder how they can be sure that a website stores their website in plain text? Just because a website sends an email confirmation with the password doesn't mean they store it in plain text. The developer could just send the email before hashing the password.

Not saying it's a good practice to send the password by email but it seems the website stretches the truth a bit.

conroy• 14 years ago

The majority of the items on the website are password reminder emails. This is after the initial sign up, which means the do indeed store it in plain text.

runako9• 14 years ago

Either that, or they store it in encrypted format. Encryption typically implies that decryption is possible. Encrypted text is not plain text. These terms do have real meanings.

You mean to say "the sites do not store the text in non-reversible format."

laurent1234563• 14 years ago

Just to be sure, I had a look at the first 20 websites - 50% of them are password reminders, the rest are registration confirmation emails so it's not the majority of them.

In any case, sending a password by email is always bad, no doubt about it, but my point is that they claim these websites store passwords as plain text when, half of the time, they don't actually know. Although this is a useful website, they lose a bit in credibility by being more sensationalist than they need to be.

runako9• 14 years ago

You're entirely correct; an outsider cannot determine whether a password is stored in encrypted format or not.

I agree that sending passwords by email is a bad idea, but I also believe that the folks behind this site should learn what it means to say "website storing a password in plain text" (from their about page). They're right, but for the wrong reasons.

marshray15• 14 years ago

If at some later time you can click a button that says "I forgot my password", and they email you the plain text password, then we know that they have stored the plain text password.

omervk7• 14 years ago

For the purpose of getting your password, reversible encryption means the same as plain-text.

_ikke_• 14 years ago

Sending passwords in plain-text over email is bad enough in itself, and it also tells a lot about how they think about plain-text passwords in general.

EvanAnderson4• 14 years ago

The pedantry in some of the comments have me practically smashing my head into my desk. The semantic arguments about whether the actual password storage mechanism is encrypted, encoded, etc, are wholly irrelevant.

If a web site can sent you a "I forgot my password" reminder email which includes your plaintext password then the site operator is storing the password in a plaintext-equivalent format. If the password is stored as a plaintext-equivalent then attackers can steal your plaintext password when they "own" the site.

To address the encryption pedantry: If a site is using encryption to store the password but the key to decrypt the password is available in the site's servers then, arguably, the encryption just amounts to an encoding. Symmetric encryption requires that the key be kept secret. Keeping the key on the servers means that it's not secret and means that it's not really encryption.

Edit:

I see that the discussion is heading this way so I'll head it off at the pass: I would argue that there is no reason that any site operator ever needs the plaintext of a user's password to be stored persistently for any reason. There is no valid reason passwords should be stored in a reversible manner.

(Somebody is going to bring up storing credit card numbers with symmetric encryption, too. That's a broken system and, arguably, needs to be replaced with something based on asymmetric encryption instead of "secret numbers" that we have to transmit between quasi-trusted parties.)

marshray15• 14 years ago

Don't smash your head. :-) Issues of authentication are inherently difficult for us humans to think about. Look at an issue one way and it's obvious, from a slightly different perspective it's extremely subtle.

runako9• 14 years ago

Granted, a lot of this discussion is pedantic.

Devil's advocate: why is it pedantry to ask for security alarms to be precise? We ask for e.g. the TSA to be precise about what it needs, should not computer security professionals be held to the same bar? Making bogus claims about a system's vulnerability (be it shoes at airports or passwords) damages the credibility of the next security alarm.

Note: I'm not defending the practice of sending passwords in the clear. But I don't think it's too much to ask for security professionals to make precise claims, when doing so is a 5-second op.

EvanAnderson4• 14 years ago

The pedantry that's irritating me is this argument about there somehow being a "safe" way to store the plaintext-equivalent version of a password (there isn't) or even that there is somehow a need to do so (there isn't).

I agree that the Plain-Text Offenders site should state this plainly.

jayzalowitz• 14 years ago

My site would fall under this and I use two layer sha-2 512 keys with unique salts... just because I send you one email does not mean I know your password (and for that matter somehow you have to be given an initial password in a lot of systems)

EvanAnderson4• 14 years ago

I'm unclear what you mean when you say "and I use two layer sha-2 512 keys with unique salts".

The Plain-Text Offenders site is concerned with web sites that can email you back your original password in plain text. Personally, I'd be most concerned when these emails are in response to an "I forgot my password" request. (Initial registration emails that send you back your plaintext password are dumb, but don't necessarily indicate that the site operator can reconstruct your plaintext password.)

If you are physically incapable of reconstructing the user's plaintext password and emailing it back to them then I'd say you're in good shape. If you have enough information to reconstruct the plaintext password then you're doing it wrong.

marshray15• 14 years ago

Does that mean that if/when an attacker uses a SQL injection vulnerability to obtain the contents of your database, will he then have a password equivalent that allows him to login as the users?

Will it enable him to mount brute-force attacks against the users' plaintext passwords?

lazyjones3• 14 years ago

> Does that mean that if/when an attacker uses a SQL injection vulnerability to obtain the contents of your database,

More pedantry: if you have a decent RDBMS like Postgres and connect to the DB always as some user A (using a Pg function with SECURITY DEFINER defined by a superuser to compare passwords with a delay, hashed or not) and use column-level permissions that disallow access to the password (or hash) column to non-superusers, they can sql inject all they want (any attempt to dump/select the password column will fail, unless they also manage to reconnect to the database as superuser).

omervk7• 14 years ago

You should never be able to retrieve the original password.

And why use a custom scheme when there's quite a few very good methods like bcrypt et al that we mention on the website?

martin-adams• 14 years ago

I like the idea of this site, but found it very frustrating trying to look at the list of offending web sites.

icebraining2• 14 years ago

With a little help of Python and the Tumblr API, here's a (dirty) list of the domains: http://paste.debian.net/222440/

omervk7• 14 years ago

Mind sharing the code? :)

hmemcpy• 14 years ago

Yeah... We're working on a "proper" site (with proper API). It will be up soon, but it's taking its time :(

shitlord• 14 years ago

Apparently, George Mason University is still on the list... two years after I sent them multiple emails and phone calls complaining about such a big security issue. It's kind of sad that you can't even depend on educational institutions to follow the security guidelines they probably teach to hundreds of students (even if that part of their website was done by a contractor).

Plain-Text Offenders Hits 1000

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