Can you trust Paul Graham with your password?

http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/05/can-you-trust-paul-graham-with-your.html

by MaysonL • 17 years ago

65 74 17 years ago

sanswork• 17 years ago

I'm predicting a long line of "Can you trust X with your password" link bait posts.

As was mentioned last time if someone is downloading your passwords you have bigger problems to worry about than the way you store your passwords.

jfarmer• 17 years ago

I think this was meant as a poke at the previous article, not a serious critique of HN's security.

jgrahamc3• 17 years ago

It was meant as a way of pointing out how you should do password security. I picked on pg just to enrage people on this site. Password security isn't hard but even the gods get it wrong sometimes.

Pity no one has pointed out that HN logins are not encrypted.

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

Well I have my 'who cares' password, my 'like this site' password and my 'involves money' password(s). Strangely, my HN password isn't the same one I use for my bank account.

joecode• 17 years ago

Exactly my strategy, too. Anyone else do this?

wlievens• 17 years ago

I hope everyone does this.

ilitirit• 17 years ago

Yes, but I've basically only have one password that shrinks depending on how sensitive the information is.

Throw-away password: "ex@mpl3"

Email password: "ex@mpl3p@55"

Finance password: "ex@mpl3p@55w0rd!"

swombat2• 17 years ago

No. I simply have a different password for every site. I use a tool called 1passwd to generate and remember all those passwords for me.

That tool backs up its (encrypted) password db to my Dropbox folder. It also backs up to an iPhone app. So I think the chances of losing all my passwords are pretty slim. And, now, I don't care whether one site loses my password, since all my passwords are unique.

kaens• 17 years ago

No, I have one slightly-convoluted-but-simple-enough-to-keep-in-my-head method of generating a password for a given site based on information about myself and the site along with some transformations.

For important passwords that I might forget, I apply another easily rememberable transformation, and write them down.

tsally• 17 years ago

I use my bank account password for everything. They'll never predict that. These criminals are sneaky, you've got to use reverse psychology if you want to truly be safe.

On a more serious note, only one of the two websites compared in these articles is a multi-million dollar business. Also, I'd say HN users are far more likely to use throw away passwords. The "enterprise" clients of 37signals probably subscribe to the philosophy in my satire above.

One final note. I don't think you can log into this site over SSL, so a discussion about password security for HN accounts is just silly. What's the point in worrying about how secure the vault is if the front door is unlocked.

tjogin2• 17 years ago

I have a unique password for each and every site I'm registered at. Outsourcing the safekeeping of your password to everyone but yourself is a bad mistake.

rythie5• 17 years ago

But which one do you use for email? where you can send resets for everything except the bank (I assume).

commiebob• 17 years ago

Seriously, enough with these threads already. The passwords aren't encrypted, he cries about it, they are encrypted, he cries about it. It's a news site, we're not controlling access to nuclear weapons here.

sid2• 17 years ago

I think the main concern is not that someone can use your account here at HN but the fact that they can get the password file and use your password to access your personal emails and whatever else (assuming that your using the same password, which some people do)

enneff• 17 years ago

"assuming that your using the same password, which some people do"

This is the key. You're an idiot if your Hacker News password is the same as that of your email.

jgrahamc3• 17 years ago

"The passwords aren't encrypted, he cries about it, they are encrypted, he cries about it."

Hmm. No, I don't. I only 'cry about it' (in your words) if the passwords are not adequately secured.

axod• 17 years ago

And the fact there is no SSL?... (Anyone can snoop your HN password in transit anyway)?

falsestprophet2• 17 years ago

Security on Hacker News is good enough. But, it would be kind of nice to have salted hashes and an absurdly expensive hashing algorithm. We are meant to be hackers after all.

A standard, or even a rationally conservative, approach seems more fit for Innocuous News.

TheAmazingIdiot2• 17 years ago

Oh come on now. We're hackers. That means some SHA1 with a little bit of salt does nothing for "Real Security".

"Real Security" would require personal acquaintance with an operator or someone they have trusted. To go down that trust chain, they would sign your GPG key. After that, posting by signing would be only done. And as per due course, you would be expected to have a HN_only GPG key for 'security reasons'.

But security for securitys sake is just wasting resources when it's just a news site, unless you're a crypto-fiend.

eru• 17 years ago

I'd prefer Off-The-Record encryption over GPG. I want plausible deniability.

dfield2• 17 years ago

As long as HackerNews hashes my password with a semi-modern algorithm, I'm fine. Storing in plaintext / something that can be decrypted is not cool, but sha1 is alright by me.

silentOpen• 17 years ago

But an unsalted hash is only better than plaintext if the attacker doesn't know enough/care enough to use a rainbow table. At that point, why do you care if it was hashed or not?

dfield2• 17 years ago

If the attacker wanted my password that bad, they would be at my house and I wouldn't be on HackerNews.

greendestiny2• 17 years ago

But that isn't nothing. For instance in the case of the reddit lost laptop incident, the information isn't immediately available to anyone who knows how to read a database dump. It has to decrypted which isn't a widely available skill and isn't instanteous even though its tractable.

TheAmazingIdiot2• 17 years ago

Simple answer: No.

Complex Answer: It depends. If it's compromised, what do I lose? If the answer is an email account, then it's an 'Aww shucks'. That's why I have backups of my address books.

However, if it's "Bank Account Numbers", it's a bit more critical. I do shield myself from that eventuality by using 'more public accounts' with limited funds. PayPal has its own bank, and a whole 5$ more than my balance needs for them. I simply and deliver the money I want them to have.

And sometimes, I could care less if somebody "hacked my account". I'm thinking about news sites and other sites that demand logins to read or post or download files (phpbb).

whatusername• 17 years ago

Primary email account is a loss though...

Think password resets for pretty much every other account of yours. Whether that is HN, Your Registrar, amazon or your bank. I never used to care about my web based email account - but now it's a big deal.

jonno99• 17 years ago

You should not trust anyone with your password.

param• 17 years ago

I think you mean "You should not trust _anyone_ with your password".

tjogin2• 17 years ago

Maybe he meant "You should not trust anyone with your password."

ajkirwin2• 17 years ago

I gotta admit, that does seem a bit lacking.

I salt MY hashes.

falsestprophet2• 17 years ago

Django salts my hashes. It is one of the many virtues of working with a mature framework.

e4m• 17 years ago

Still allows for brute-force. Distributed.net is bruting (I know that is not a word) approximately 150 billion a second. No one knows what Uncle Sam and other Nation States can do in this regard. So, salt is good, but you still need big passwords (min 72 bits) to keep the big boys out. 6.5 bit-entropy per ASCII char... that means you need at least 11 chars in your password, OK?

burke• 17 years ago

If you honestly understand how the internet works, _and_ are concerned about password security, how can you NOT be using a different password on every site? (or at least a throwaway password for accounts you don't care about)

EDIT: I guess the biggest reason would be that you likely haven't discovered the awesomeness that is 1Password yet. http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password . There are probably free alternatives. (EDIT Again: Mac only. There are Windows alternatives too :) )

tlrobinson3• 17 years ago

I bought 1Password as part of one of those Mac software bundles, but still haven't figured out how it's any better than Safari + Keychain's built in password manager. Can someone please explain it to me?

mdemare• 17 years ago

It generates secure passwords. It syncs passwords for all browsers. It creates backups. Autofill for credit-card data. Multiple logins per site.

Manfred• 17 years ago

Hashing passwords doesn't add any real security when the server is compromised, the attacker can just take the entire database.

For a news site accounts are used for identification and not for protection of goods or information so it doesn't matter that much anyway. If the admin of the site finds out that the system is compromised, it's pretty easy to just reset all passwords.

jseifer• 17 years ago

I'm relatively confident that the potential uncovering of some news site password doesn't matter for this demographic. This is hacker news, after all :)

illumen• 17 years ago

Let's see how long it takes the hacker news team to fix!

(Or even some lisp hackers to beat pg with their own patch!)

Three main issues: 1) improper use of hashing. No salt used. 2) sha1 is not the best hash to be using. 3) passwords are not encrypted in the browser. So are sent clear text.

Fixes for issues one and two, are covered in the article...

For issue 3), you can do the hash+salt client side (with js) if SSL isn't feasible.

cu.

rythie5• 17 years ago

If you do hash+salt client side, then the final hash is your password essentially, which will be sent in the clear. Anyone sniff the already hashed password to login to your HN account without knowing your actual password.

What you didn't say but might have implied is: If you have the server challenge the client with a different salt each time it would fix the problem.

Of course SSL also tells you the you are talking to the real server, challenge response doesn't really help that, nor does it stop some stealing your session id and posting as you.

oomkiller• 17 years ago

Salts are near worthless since someone who has access to a web app or the source will probably be able to read the salt. The bcrypt recommendation is somewhat good though, but you can never be perfect. Currently in my web apps we use sha1, but we run it through about 10 times, so it slows an attacker down a bit.

jpf• 17 years ago

Being able to read the salt doesn't make it worthless, because salts are meant to complicate dictionary attacks.

rythie5• 17 years ago

If you don't have salt, the more passwords you have, the easier it is for someone to find one password by a dictionary attack. If you have a lot of passwords you should use salt, if you don't have a lot you still expect your app to grow don't you?

jrockway2• 17 years ago

This is what's nice about using languages with libraries. If I want to do an unsalted SHA-1, like news.yc, I would write:

    use Authen::Passphrase;
    my $pw = Authen::Passphrase::SaltedDigest->new(
        algorithm  => "SHA-1", 
        passphrase => "passphrase",
    );

If I instead wanted to be secure, and use bcrypt (which I always do, even for the most trivial sites), I would just write:

    my $pw = Authen::Passphrase::BlowfishCrypt->new(
        cost        => 8, 
        salt_random => 1,
        passphrase  => "passphrase",
    );

Notice how I get better security without any extra effort? That is the joy of not being the only user of your programming language, and that's how you ensure that people do the Right Thing with your data -- make it easy for them.

(I'll also mention that it gets better; with Moose type coercions, I can basically treat the password as cleartext -- the type coercion converts a Str into a Passphrase. To set it, I supply the cleartext password as an initarg when instantiating a user; when changing it, the writer accessor handles the coerciion; when checking it, I delegate to the passphrase's check_passphrase method. A great API with great security, involving almost no effort on my part. <3.)

dchest4• 17 years ago

Don't you think (system (+ "openssl dgst -sha1 <" fname)) can be as easy replaced with (system (+ "bcrypt whatever_parameters <" fname))?

Notice how I get better security without any extra effort? That is the joy of using an operating system.

dchest4• 17 years ago

Apologies for the wording of my comment. What I mean is that you don't have to worry about libraries for languages a lot if you can use the power of your OS ecosystem (especially, *nix one) in your application (considering performance and other limitations).

strlen3• 17 years ago

Doing system requires forking your entire interpreter/VM. That's a huge performance penalty.

rythie5• 17 years ago

I'm thinking that a salt could be retro fitted by changing the check from: sha1($password); to sha1(sha1($password) . $salt);

and you could update the database for that easily.

umbrae2• 17 years ago

Isn't there some evidence that hashing a hash is cryptographically weaker?

rythie5• 17 years ago

Yes it is probably slightly weaker. It would be weaker if there are collisions in the 1-16 character password space for sha1 (assuming a 16 character limit on the password).

My point was that if you already have a lot hashed passwords then you need a way to transition to salted ones and this was a method to do that.

alexk• 17 years ago

Ok, now go visit all open source web apps and post here, you can even write a script for that.

jodrellblank• 17 years ago

The flavour of the 37Signals comments was very harshly against 37S, these are mildly to strongly in favour of HN.

Yet, here we have a recent, real example of a moderator account on a popular site cracked because a different site wasn't salting:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595655

AndrewHampton• 17 years ago

This article also completely ignores the fact that you can use OpenID to log into HN which bypasses this issue altogether.

quellhorst• 17 years ago

My password is a hash created by 1Password. Plus this is a low value account.

umbrae2• 17 years ago

So what's the best way to migrate a site that's using sha1 without salts to one that does use salts?

I expect it involves checking users' passwords two different ways (with salt, without) for the foreseeable future.

Can you trust Paul Graham with your password?

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