Worse Than Useless: Personal Security Images

http://www.worsethanuseless.com/post/42126289484/worse-than-useless-personal-security-images

by lann • 13 years ago

93 79 13 years ago

worsethanuseless.com

mrslx• 13 years ago

Passwords ID you to the entity. Images ID the entity to you.

While not a perfect system, it works to some degree IMO. I still prefer two-fold auth.

DenisM• 13 years ago

The image does not ID the system to you, that's the whole point of the article! A spoofer site would simply go to the spoofed site, fetch the image, and give it to you.

derefr• 13 years ago

Theoretically, the image could be stored as a blob in your localStorage, encrypted with the server's public key. When you go to the bank's site, a bit of AJAX pops it up to them, they decrypt it server-side, then serve it back to you as an image (all over SSL, please.) The phisher can try to do all the same steps, but without the originator's private key, they'll be left with a useless encrypted blob that can't be turned into a servable image.

cookiecaper5• 13 years ago

Right, it doesn't verify the entity with 100% certainty, but it's still probably a good thing to have, because it should be a relatively simple change in the bank's code and it creates a lot of extra work for an attacker.

It's just another safeguard, and I think it does a fine job being that. It's not meant as an iron-clad, utterly impenetrable phishing prevention mechanism. If OP believed that, perhaps he is the gullible one.

dfc4• 13 years ago

The article fails to recognize the value of the "security images" to the banks. The banks have used these images to satisfy the requirements of the FFIEC guidance "Authentication in an Internet Banking Environment"[1].

Any complaints about the value of the security images should not be addressed to banks. You should direct your complaints to the FFIEC and/or to your banks regulator (OTS, OCC or NCUA).

[1] http://www.ffiec.gov/pdf/Auth-ITS-Final%206-22-11%20%28FFIEC...

latimer• 13 years ago

Interesting, I've always wondered why so many banks use this system online instead of something more robust like two-step auth.

dfc4• 13 years ago

The only reason the banks use these systems to begin with is the FFIEC guidance. These "improvements" were not voluntarily put in place by forward thinking bankers, they had to because their regulators told them to. So it is all about the cost of the system. Before anyone says Chase/HSBC makes X billion dollars profit keep in mind that these regulations also apply to smaller community banks with 5 Billion in holdings.

Keep this in mind when you assess any of these systems; the authentication systems are not put in place to manage customer risk, they are put into place to manage regulatory risk.

mortehu2• 13 years ago

When I signed up for USAA, by default they had a silly authentication system based on "security questions". I was very disappointed until I found out that they support several mechanisms, and allow you to disable the ones you won't use. Hence, I use the one where I combine my password with a token generated by a mobile app. Maybe other banks have alternate authentication mechanisms stashed away as well?

svachalek2• 13 years ago

I've only seen two step used to validate the user to the server. Are there sites that use two step to verify the server to the client?

gojomo3• 13 years ago

Are they the people to blame for the 15-minute bank login timeouts everywhere, too?

Because I can't think of a more frustrating and anti-security policy that claims to be "for your security".

(By requiring many more repeated logins, the risk rises that I'll slip one time and not carefully check that the DNS/SSL info is correct.)

Firehed2• 13 years ago

It's a trade off between that and allowing some random stranger to transfer your money if you get up and forget to lock your computer. Our first alpha didn't have the auto-logout and by far the most common piece of feedback we got was that we needed it.

danso• 13 years ago

What's the alternative?

Online-services such as iCloud, Facebook, GMail, etc. don't auto-logout but they also have designed endpoints in which you need to re-authenticate (when changing the password, address info, anything dealing with authentication processes, generally) while still logged in.

How would this work for banks? Besides reauthenticating when changing critical account info, should someone be forced to reauthenticate when they make a transfer? Or a transfer of a certain amount of money?

While banking software is very sophisticated, my impression is that that's in the transactional system. My impression from using three different banks to manage my funds is that bank corporations are entirely less sophisticated in the user interface arena.

I think many people at HN remember American Express's debug mode snafu: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/06/zero-day-vulnerability-on-a...

And I remember when their antiquated system couldn't handle anything more sophisticated than 8 character case insensitive passwords.

I much prefer that banks, for the time being, play it safe with the auto-logout.

nwh• 13 years ago

Great, they're probably responsible for this too. Every time you try and use a new tab or navigation (back, forward, refresh) on my banks website, you get kicked out to the main page. It's like someone has never heard of form keys.

http://i.imgur.com/erm0faA.png

Firehed2• 13 years ago

I skimmed the PDF and didn't see what you're referring to; however, I did see it explicitly point out the ineffectiveness of "security" questions.

dfc4• 13 years ago

This all started with the first supplement the FFIEC put out regarding authentication in an internet environment in 2005[1]. This initial supplement was put out to clarify what was expected of banks especially with regards to the FFIEC examination handbooks regarding e-banking[2] and information security[3]. (This all began with 12CFR30B[4][5])

Are you familiar with reading federal regulator-ese? They do not ever come out and make blanket statements such as use XYZ, ensure X bit keys and so on. The entire process is based on the banks and the examiner's interpretation of the bank's risk profile. If you are interested in learning more about this reading some of the banking industry press coverage at the time may be easier to digest.

[1] http://www.ffiec.gov/bsa_aml_infobase/documents/new_5_2007/O...

[2] http://ithandbook.ffiec.gov/it-booklets/e-banking.aspx

[3] http://ithandbook.ffiec.gov/it-booklets/information-security...

[4] http://ithandbook.ffiec.gov/media/21989/occ-12cfr30-safe_sou...

[5] I say 12cfr30b because that is what got the ball rolling for OCC regulated banks and at the time I worked for an OCC regulated bank. Depending on who the regulator (OTS, NCUA, etc) is the "ball rolling document" will be different.

ryen2• 13 years ago

Not a lot of information regarding security images in there and not all banks use them. BofA does, but not Chase. Therefore I have to assume its some lame compliance committee within the bank determining usage.

dfc4• 13 years ago

You are safe assuming that risk managment at banks is not implemented uniformly across the industry.

Were you expecting it to say "security images are required"?

tghw4• 13 years ago

Security is not about guaranteeing anything, it's about making it more difficult to break in. The lock on your front door does nothing to guarantee a burglar won't enter your home, it just makes it more difficult to do so.

The examples he gives either have the potential of alerting the user to the spoof (via the missing image) or require significantly more work to spoof the user (via a complex proxy at the router level or obtaining a homographic URL).

Either way, the barrier to stealing users credentials has gone up, which is exactly what security measures are intended to do. Hardly useless, and definitely not "worse than useless".

yid• 13 years ago

Complex proxy?? You mean a headless browser like phantomjs and a slightly higher latency apparent to the client. Hardly difficult, which leads to the false sense of security these images provide. It's made slightly harder on the order of minutes to write a few extra lines of code.

nmcfarl• 13 years ago

I'm always surprised when I write a scraper/proxy (usually in perl) at how little added latency is involved. If I host the thing on a fat pipe (say an EC2 instance), it's not even noticeable at home.

pbreit• 13 years ago

It would probably need to be more complex than that if the bank is watching for unexpected activity from individual IP addresses.

tghw4• 13 years ago

The code for the proxy itself isn't that complex, no. But it would have to be tailored to the target's banking site. Again, not extremely complex, but more difficult. And actually implementing the attack, including getting a homographic URL or rouge router, is quite a bit more difficult.

Again, the point is that the security image makes the attackers' lives more difficult. The image lends no "false sense of security" because without the image, you'd have the same sense of security.

rwg• 13 years ago

It's more complicated than that. Like physical security, computer security is applied risk management.

Your house probably doesn't have solid metal doors, metal bars over the windows, laser tripwires, a patrolling security guard, and angry Doberman Pinschers. All of those things would increase your home's security, but the cost of the security probably doesn't make sense compared to the risks involved with your house getting burgled.

Similarly, Hacker News doesn't require client TLS certificates, two-factor authentication, and insanely complex passwords. The risk of horrible and/or costly things happening because someone's HN account got broken into really isn't there, so implementing those security measures doesn't make much sense.

Even if the author's bank's security picture doesn't actually decrease fraud at all, the security picture was probably cheap to implement, required minimal user and employee training, and keeps the lawyers and regulators happy. The bank's risk exposure decreases, even if the author's doesn't.

vog• 13 years ago

> ... the security picture was probably cheap to implement ...

Although the implementation might have been cheap, there's another factor to consider:

If a system provides a false sense of security, this almost certainly decreases the actual security of the system.

And putting effort (no matter how cheap) into something that decreases the overall security - that's not a good idea regarding risk management.

aptwebapps6• 13 years ago

No, it really is worse than useless. It is trivial to fetch the image - anyone with a passing familiarity with jQuery can probably do it.

Kiro• 13 years ago

Maybe I'm missing your point but you can't do cross-domain requests in jQuery (without JSONP) so it would still require a server layer.

tghw4• 13 years ago

How is it worse?

And how exactly do you plan on serving the image to the user? Do you have a rouge router? Or a homographic URL?

And consider, if you do have either of those things, then you can do so much more than spoofing an image, like reading all traffic, including SSL.

KMag2• 13 years ago

^this.

Also, security images enable other methods for making attackers' lives difficult. Note that forcing proxies to grab the images allows the bank to focus on the IPs that request the highest number of images, or at least block known Tor exit nodes. Sure this forces people running Tor exit nodes to call in, but the percentage is so small that the bank won't care.

davidcuddeback5• 13 years ago

To add to that, the security image can potentially raise the barrier a lot more than the author led on. Usually [1], the bank asks you to answer a security question before showing you the personal security image. Most people don't see this because they check the "remember this computer" option the first time they login, so even showing the security question so that one can grab the image will seem suspicious to many users.

[1] I just tested this with Ally (the bank shown in the blog post) and I remember it being true with ING Direct. I haven't tested other banks.

Hello71• 13 years ago

Unless, of course, a reasonable implementation were used, tying the image to a cookie and using the browser security to prevent it being sent to different domains; if you're on a subdomain of a bank already, there are far more effective ways to execute an attack.

krallin• 13 years ago

Exactly. Any proper implementation of this kind of security should not depend on the username, this would entirely break the purpose.

mortehu2• 13 years ago

Bank of America ties it to your user name, which is one of the reasons I quit using them.

boydster2• 13 years ago

This is exactly how Yahoo implemented this. The downside is that you have to select a new "sign in seal" for each browser/computer that you use.

jtokoph• 13 years ago

All an attacker has to do is present the "we don't remember this computer" screen and ask them to setup a new image once they "log in".

schabernakk• 13 years ago

BMO, Bank of Montreal uses these along with a security phrase. Its absolutely ridiculous that this is mandated by some standard, but there is no guidance on password strength itself. BMO has a strict only 6 characters (no more, no less) policy. Oh yeah, before anyone asks: No numbers, no special characters. Choosable by the customer when opening the account.

cookiecaper5• 13 years ago

I find password restrictions often prohibit good but unconventional password models, like the "actual phrase for a passphrase" crowd. I think the possibility of an online brute force should already be near-zero for banking apps, and if an offline brute force attack can be conducted, it's likely that a) your password isn't going to matter much anymore and b) the typically arbitrary password requirements set up by the site aren't going to do much to stop any significant GPU-based hash attack.

The issue is that most people rely on memory to store passwords. Any term that is memorable and meets most online password "standards" is short enough for an offline brute force to break pretty quickly, especially if the attacker has some decent resources. The answer to this is "real phrase" passphrases, but many sites with password rules won't allow these.

politician• 13 years ago

Also, per xkcd, et. al., rate limiting login attempts on a per-user and global basis significantly increases the difficulty of brute-forcing access even given password frequency lists.

duaneb3• 13 years ago

> BMO has a strict only 6 characters (no more, no less) policy.

At what point can you start suing for negligence of proper precautions protecting your money?

cbhl• 13 years ago

IIRC, most of these banks have insurance to cover that case, so in theory you shouldn't lose any money provided you notify them in a timely manner of unauthorized transactions.

a3_nm• 13 years ago

My bank (BNP Paribas in France) has an even worse policy: 6 digits. No more, no less. They try to prevent phishing attempts with mouse-based PIN entry, require you to change the password every so many logins, but the fact remains: there are only one million possible combinations.

Havoc• 13 years ago

I kinda like my bank's implementation of it: Social security number equivalent for username, then you get the security phrase on the same page where you type in the password, then you get a two factor auth page (cellphone).

So it helps for when you fuck up the username or something else is weird, but security doesn't really rely on it.

Though I don't think there are any banks in my country that don't use 2 factor, so its a bit of a moot point anyway.

KMag2• 13 years ago

Count yourself lucky for living in a country where your national ID number isn't assumed to be some kind of non-revokable terrible 9-digit pencil-and-paper OAuth token that's shared with half the world. I'm told that Norway's tax IDs are considered no less secret than phone numbers.

Coming from the US, I mis-parsed your post as (Social Security number) (equivalent for username) on first read and thought "That's so backwards! They're treating SSNs as less important than passwords". It's probably better to say "national ID number" or "national tax ID" rather than "Social security number equivalent".

san86• 13 years ago

This could work if security questions (not the best form of security by itself) are asked if the request comes from a "not previously used" computer. So that way, if the phishing site is sending a request on my behalf, they would have to answer my challenge questions (w/o human intervention i.e.) before getting to the image... that kinda makes life harder for an attacker.. of course the logic of identifying the "first time you are using this machine" thing needs to be non-stupid (for lack of a better word)

Spooky23• 13 years ago

The blog post is worse than useless.

The images give you as a user a sense of situational awareness -- I know based on the picture which of a half dozen accounts I have (personal, Ira, business, etc) I'm logging into.

They also make it more difficult to misdirect people to a lookalike site via phishing. Even old people recognize that their login picture, normally prominently displayed, is missing.

no_more_death• 13 years ago

Right. It's not correct that people will blithely accept an error like "Error: this image failed to load." These people don't think about errors the same way we do. To them all errors are the same and mean there's a catastrophic failure. Developers understand that some errors are minor, but a user faced with an error, where he expects a reassuring "security image," will probably become fearful and bail from that page.

Of course, he might still type in his password even if he decides not to go through and submit the form, in which case his data is still compromised.

peeters2• 13 years ago

Fine, so just omit the area for the image completely. Showing an error in place of the image is obviously a stupid choice over just asking for the password up front, and just omitting it (by pretending there shouldn't be one) will not trigger panic in non-savvy or forgetful users.

svachalek2• 13 years ago

This is true for a frequent user but honestly I log into so many different web sites that I'm pretty certain I'd not think much of anything if one of the login pages was redesigned without notice. Fortunately I'm also pretty sure I'd never fall for phishing links, but I'm sure the list of people who'd fall for both is sufficiently long that it doesn't matter.

peeters2• 13 years ago

> The images give you as a user a sense of situational awareness -- I know based on the picture which of a half dozen accounts I have (personal, Ira, business, etc) I'm logging into.

Cool you found a use for them, but that's not why they're there. Almost always when you're being asked to choose one, it's "for your security..."

> They also make it more difficult to misdirect people to a lookalike site via phishing. Even old people recognize that their login picture, normally prominently displayed, is missing.

First, it's not hard to mirror the interactions of the real site (there's actually a section in the post about sophisticated attacks which addresses this).

Second, I doubt very much that old people would notice anything missing, particularly if you masked it as a site redesign/upgrade. I myself am a fairly cautious user, but would I notice if the site for the MasterCard I recently got, which I've logged into maybe 3-4 times and never more than once a month, asked for my username and password up front rather than in a 2-stage format? I honestly doubt I would.

slavak• 13 years ago

I think old people and the less tech-savvy users are exactly the people who would notice something like this.

The less a person understands about computers, the more they rely on habit to use them. My mother calls me to ask what she should do whenever the tiniest change or unexpected balloon pop-up appears. The answer is invariable always the same: "Ignore it". But she calls every time, without fail, regardless.

So you might not notice the security image at all. My mother, who's used to her bank website always looking a certain way, will become very concerned when the security image is missing.

sswaner• 13 years ago

I disagree with your second point. I manage a financial services portal that uses what looks like this same system (from RSA). We deployed it to satisfy regulatory requirements. Any time there is a hiccup in the system (such as RSA's servers going down or slow) we are flooded with calls asking if it is safe to login. Our users are not tech-savvy, and many are 40+.

ryen2• 13 years ago

I think you missed the entire point of the article. Re-read it please.

nathanhammond• 13 years ago

This is part of a system called Passmark which was acquired by RSA many years ago.

As part of the newest releases of RSA's security approach it has been deprecated. In a few years you won't see this anywhere on the web (or, if you do, you'll know that the login and security portion of that site hasn't been looked at in years... also scary).

The banking industry is moving toward one-time passwords sent out-of-band and/or Google Authenticator for "something you have."

chmike• 13 years ago

The image is a way for the user to "manually" authenticate the server. It's a weak authentication because an attacker could easily get a copy of this image once he knows the user identifier and forge a apparently valid page.

The most secure authentication is the one using security cards/key with a challenge code sent by the bank and the response returned by the key using bi-key cryptography. The one with usb connections would be most efficient, convenient and secure.

Nfc on phones may look more attractive, but phones are insecure.

subpixel• 13 years ago

Exactly: http://ryandeussing.com/blog/2011/11/14/corn-on-the-cob-secu...

Worse Than Useless: Personal Security Images

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