passwords

How an email account without passwords can be good for security

From Robert X. Cringely’s “Stream On“:

Mailinator is ad hoc e-mail for those times when just maybe you don’t want to use your regular e-mail address. Say you are snitching on the boss, buying inflatable people, or want 32 different PayPal accounts. Just tell someone—anyone—that your e-mail address is fatman@mailinator.com or skinnykid@mailinator.com, or clueless@mailinator.com or any other address you like at mailinator.com. But this is no dead-end. When people write to you at that address the message will go through. That’s because Mailinator accepts any message going to that domain and automatically assigns an e-mail account to it. But what about passwords? There are none. Anyone can go to Mailinator and check the mail for clueless or any other name. But with so many names and the idea that Mailinator is only for occasional use, who cares?

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My favorite iPhone apps

Someone on a mailing list asked for a list of our favorite iPhone apps. Here’s what I said:

Reeder is the best RSS reader (tied to Google Reader, natch), bar none.

Articles presents Wikipedia beautifully.

Dropbox is an essential for the reasons Martin gave.

Echofon is a great Twitter app, especially since it syncs with its Mac desktop app.

Pano takes panoramic pix, ColorSplash allows you to make pix B&W & then selectively colorize them, & Camera+ has all sorts of goodies.

Rowmote Pro lets me control my Mac mini connected to my TV remotely.

Simplenote is a great note app that syncs with its website & JustNotes on my Mac.

1Password keeps passwords, account info, serial #’s, & sensitive notes encrypted & synced with the Mac version of the app using Dropbox.

Nightstand is a gorgeous alarm clock & more.

Amazon.com makes it too easy for me to spend $$$.

PhoneFlicks manages my Netflix queue.

And finally, even though it’s only been out for a day or two, Rage 3D is a killer shooter that looks freakin’ gorgeous.

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A story of failed biometrics at a gym

Fingerprints
Creative Commons License photo credit: kevindooley

From Jake Vinson’s “Cracking your Fingers” (The Daily WTF: 28 April 2009):

A few days later, Ross stood proudly in the reception area, hands on his hips. A high-tech fingerprint scanner sat at the reception area near the turnstile and register, as the same scanner would be used for each, though the register system wasn’t quite ready for rollout yet. Another scanner sat on the opposite side of the turnstile, for gym members to sign out. … The receptionist looked almost as pleased as Ross that morning as well, excited that this meant they were working toward a system that necessitated less manual member ID lookups.

After signing a few people up, the new system was going swimmingly. Some users declined to use the new system, instead walking to the far side of the counter to use the old touchscreen system. Then Johnny tried to leave after his workout.

… He scanned his finger on his way out, but the turnstile wouldn’t budge.

“Uh, just a second,” the receptionist furiously typed and clicked, while Johnny removed one of his earbuds out and stared. “I’ll just have to manually override it…” but it was useless. There was no manual override option. Somehow, it was never considered that the scanner would malfunction. After several seconds of searching and having Johnny try to scan his finger again, the receptionist instructed him just to jump over the turnstile.

It was later discovered that the system required a “sign in” and a “sign out,” and if a member was recognized as someone else when attempting to sign out, the system rejected the input, and the turnstile remained locked in position. This was not good.

The scene repeated itself several times that day. Worse, the fingerprint scanner at the exit was getting kind of disgusting. Dozens of sweaty fingerprints required the scanner to be cleaned hourly, and even after it was freshly cleaned, it sometimes still couldn’t read fingerprints right. The latticed patterns on the barbell grips would leave indented patterns temporarily on the members’ fingers, there could be small cuts or folds on fingertips just from carrying weights or scrapes on the concrete coming out of the pool, fingers were wrinkly after a long swim, or sometimes the system just misidentified the person for no apparent reason.

Fingerprint Scanning

In much the same way that it’s not a good idea to store passwords in plaintext, it’s not a good idea to store raw fingerprint data. Instead, it should be hashed, so that the same input will consistently give the same output, but said output can’t be used to determine what the input was. In biometry, there are many complex algorithms that can analyze a fingerprint via several points on the finger. This system was set up to record seven points.

After a few hours of rollout, though, it became clear that the real world doesn’t conform to how it should’ve worked in theory. There were simply too many variables, too many activities in the gym that could cause fingerprints to become altered. As such, the installers did what they thought was the reasonable thing to do – reduce the precision from seven points down to something substantially lower.

The updated system was in place for a few days, and it seemed to be working better; no more people being held up trying to leave.

Discovery

… [The monitor] showed Ray as coming in several times that week, often twice on the same day, just hours apart. For each day listed, Ray had only come the later of the two times.

Reducing the precision of the fingerprint scanning resulted in the system identifying two people as one person. Reviewing the log, they saw that some regulars weren’t showing up in the system, and many members had two or three people being identified by the scanner as them.

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What passwords do people use? phpBB examples

From Robert Graham’s “PHPBB Password Analysis” (Dark Reading: 6 February 2009):

A popular Website, phpbb.com, was recently hacked. The hacker published approximately 20,000 user passwords from the site. …

This incident is similar to one two years ago when MySpace was hacked, revealing about 30,000 passwords. …

The striking different between the two incidents is that the phpbb passwords are simpler. MySpace requires that passwords “must be between 6 and 10 characters, and contain at least 1 number or punctuation character.” Most people satisfied this requirement by simply appending “1” to the ends of their passwords. The phpbb site has no such restrictions — the passwords are shorter and rarely contain anything more than a dictionary word.

It’s hard to judge exactly how many passwords are dictionary words. … I ran the phpbb passwords through various dictionary files and come up with a 65% match (for a simple English dictionary) and 94% (for “hacker” dictionaries). …

16% of passwords matched a person’s first name. This includes people choosing their own first names or those of their spouses or children. The most popular first names were Joshua, Thomas, Michael, and Charlie. But I wonder if there is something else going on. Joshua, for example, was also the password to the computer in “Wargames” …

14% of passwords were patterns on the keyboard, like “1234,” “qwerty,” or “asdf.” There are a lot of different patterns people choose, like “1qaz2wsx” or “1q2w3e.” I spent a while googling “159357,” trying to figure out how to categorize it, then realized it was a pattern on the numeric keypad. …

4% are variations of the word “password,” such as “passw0rd,” “password1,” or “passwd.” I googled “drowssap,” trying to figure out how to categorize it, until I realized it was “password” spelled backward.

5% of passwords are pop-culture references from TV, movies, and music. These tend to be youth culture (“hannah,” “pokemon,” “tigger”) and geeky (“klingon,” “starwars,” “matrix,” “legolas,” “ironman”). … Some notable pop-culture references are chosen not because they are popular, but because they sound like passwords, such as “ou812” (’80s Van Halen album), “blink182” (’90s pop), “rush2112” (’80s album), and “8675309” (’80s pop song).

4% of passwords appear to reference things nearby. The name “samsung” is a popular password, I think because it’s the brand name on the monitor that people are looking at … Similarly, there are a lot of names of home computers like “dell,” “packard,” “apple,” “pavilion,” “presario,” “compaq,” and so on. …

3% of passwords are “emo” words. Swear words, especially the F-word, are common, but so are various forms of love and hate (like “iloveyou” or “ihateyou”).

3% are “don’t care” words. … A lot of password choices reflect this attitude, either implicitly with “abc123” or “blahblah,” or explicitly with “whatever,” “whocares,” or “nothing.”

1.3% are passwords people saw in movies/TV. This is a small category, consisting only of “letmein,” “trustno1,” “joshua,” and “monkey,” but it accounts for a large percentage of passwords.

1% are sports related. …

Here is the top 20 passwords from the phpbb dataset. You’ll find nothing surprising here; all of them are on this Top 500 list.

3.03% “123456”
2.13% “password”
1.45% “phpbb”
0.91% “qwerty”
0.82% “12345”
0.59% “12345678”
0.58% “letmein”
0.53% “1234”
0.50% “test”
0.43% “123”
0.36% “trustno1”
0.33% “dragon”
0.31% “abc123”
0.31% “123456789”
0.31% “111111”
0.30% “hello”
0.30% “monkey”
0.28% “master”
0.22% “killer”
0.22% “123123”

Notice that whereas “myspace1” was one of the most popular passwords in the MySpace dataset, “phpbb” is one of the most popular passwords in the phpbb dataset.

The password length distribution is as follows:

1 character 0.34%
2 characters 0.54%
3 characters 2.92%
4 characters 12.29%
5 characters 13.29%
6 characters 35.16%
7 characters 14.60%
8 characters 15.50%
9 characters 3.81%
10 characters 1.14%
11 characters 0.22%

Note that phpbb has no requirements for password lengths …

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Conficker creating a new gargantuan botneth

From Asavin Wattanajantra’s “Windows worm could create the ‘world’s biggest botnet’” (IT PRO: 19 January 2009):

The Downadup or “Conficker” worm has increased to over nine million infections over the weekend – increasing from 2.4 million in a four-day period, according to F-Secure.

The worm has password cracking capabilities, which is often successful because company passwords sometimes match a predefined password list that the worm carries.

Corporate networks around the world have already been infected by the network worm, which is particularly hard to eradicate as it is able to evolve – making use of a long list of websites – by downloading another version of itself.

Rik Ferguson, solution architect at Trend Micro, told IT PRO that the worm was very difficult to block for security companies as they had to make sure that they blocked every single one of the hundreds of domains that it could download from.

Ferguson said that the worm was creating a staggering amount of infections, even if just the most conservative infection estimates are taken into account. He said: “What’s particularly interesting about this worm is that it is the first hybrid with old school worm infection capabilities and command and control infrastructure.”

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Rainbow Tables crack passwords

From Chapter 2: Botnets Overview of Craig A. Schiller’s Botnets: The Killer Web App (Syngress: 2007):

According to the Rainbowtables.net Web site, using their tables and others on the Internet “it is possible to crack almost any password under 15 characters using a mixed alphanumeric combination with symbols for LM, NTLM, PIX Firewall, MD4, and MD5.” Their market spiel says, “hackers have them and so should you.”

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Why you should not run Windows as Admin

From Aaron Margosis’ “Why you shouldn’t run as admin…” (17 June 2004):

But if you’re running as admin [on Windows], an exploit can:

  • install kernel-mode rootkits and/or keyloggers (which can be close to impossible to detect)
  • install and start services
  • install ActiveX controls, including IE and shell add-ins (common with spyware and adware)
  • access data belonging to other users
  • cause code to run whenever anybody else logs on (including capturing passwords entered into the Ctrl-Alt-Del logon dialog)
  • replace OS and other program files with trojan horses
  • access LSA Secrets, including other sensitive account information, possibly including account info for domain accounts
  • disable/uninstall anti-virus
  • cover its tracks in the event log
  • render your machine unbootable
  • if your account is an administrator on other computers on the network, the malware gains admin control over those computers as well
  • and lots more

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Bad passwords for SSH

From Christian Seifert’s “Analyzing malicious SSH login attempts” (SecurityFocus: 11 September 2006):

First, we analyzed the login names that were used on the login attempts. During the sample period, there were 2741 unique account names ranging from common first names, system account names, and common accounts to short alphabetical strings captured by the system logger. Of those, the 15 account names used most often are shown in Table 1. This table shows accounts that usually exist on a system (root, mysql), accounts that are likely to exist on a system (guest, test), as well as common first names (paul). Then Figure 1 shows the distribution of valid and invalid account names that were used.

Account Name Number of login attempts
root 1049
admin 97
test 87
guest 40
mysql 31
info 30
oracle 27
postgres 27
testing 27
webmaster 27
paul 25
web 24
user 23
tester 22
pgsql 21

Table 1. Top 15 account names among 2741 attempts.

Next, we looked at the passwords used in the login attempts. The attackers tried a range of passwords with most of the account names. In total during our analysis, they attempted to access 2741 different accounts and used 3649 different passwords. Not all passwords were used with all accounts. The passwords ranged from account names, account names with number sequences, number sequences, and keyboard sequences (like ‘qwerty’). There were a few more complex passwords used with seemingly random letter and number sequences or common substitution passwords (like r00t or c@t@lin).

Table 2 shows the top 15 passwords used in malicious login attempts.

Password Number of login attempts
123456 331
Password 106
Admin 47
Test 46
111111 36
12345 34
administrator 28
Linux 23
Root 22
test123 22
1234 21
123 20
Mysql 19
Apache 18
Master 18

Table 2. Top 15 passwords attempted.

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Two-factor authentication: the good & the bad

From Bruce Schneier’s “More on Two-Factor Authentication” (Crypto-Gram: 15 April 2005):

Passwords just don’t work anymore. As computers have gotten faster, password guessing has gotten easier. Ever-more-complicated passwords are required to evade password-guessing software. At the same time, there’s an upper limit to how complex a password users can be expected to remember. About five years ago, these two lines crossed: It is no longer reasonable to expect users to have passwords that can’t be guessed. For anything that requires reasonable security, the era of passwords is over.

Two-factor authentication solves this problem. It works against passive attacks: eavesdropping and password guessing. It protects against users choosing weak passwords, telling their passwords to their colleagues or writing their passwords on pieces of paper taped to their monitors. For an organization trying to improve access control for its employees, two-factor authentication is a great idea. Microsoft is integrating two-factor authentication into its operating system, another great idea.

What two-factor authentication won’t do is prevent identity theft and fraud. It’ll prevent certain tactics of identity theft and fraud, but criminals simply will switch tactics. We’re already seeing fraud tactics that completely ignore two-factor authentication. As banks roll out two-factor authentication, criminals simply will switch to these new tactics.

One way to think about this is that two-factor authentication solves security problems involving authentication. The current wave of attacks against financial systems are not exploiting vulnerabilities in the authentication system, so two-factor authentication doesn’t help.

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California’s wide-open educational software reveals personal info

From Nanette Asimov’s “Software glitch reveals private data for thousands of state’s students” (San Francisco Chronicle: 21 October 2005):

The personal information of tens of thousands of California children — including their names, state achievement test scores, identification numbers and status in gifted or special-needs programs — is open to public view through a security loophole in dozens of school districts statewide that use a popular education software system.

Teacher names and employee identification numbers are also visible to anyone logging onto the system, which is used locally by school districts including San Francisco, San Jose and Hayward.

The problem occurs when the districts issue a generic password to teachers using the system. Until the teacher changes to a unique password, anyone can type in a teacher’s user name and generic password and gain access to information about students that is supposed to be guarded as closely as the gold in Fort Knox. …

San Francisco administrators immediately shut down access to the service, called OARS — Online Assessment Reporting System — after a reporter phoned and said she had been able to access student information for all the children in two middle-school classes where the teachers had not yet changed their passwords. …

Most of the 96 districts statewide that use the system are in Southern California and the Central Valley. …

“We have confidence in the professionalism of our teachers” not to share their passwords, Bradshaw said.

But told how simple it was to gain access to the student records of any teacher who had not yet changed to a unique password, the administrators said they planned to make sure teachers did so.

“We will definitely monitor that,” Quinn said. “We don’t want anyone getting into student information.”

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Rainbow cracking is now a public service

From Robert Lemos’s Rainbow warriors crack password hashes (The Register: 10 November 2005):

Over the past two years, three security enthusiasts from the United States and Europe set a host of computers to the task of creating eleven enormous tables of data that can be used to look up common passwords. The tables – totaling 500GB – form the core data of a technique known as rainbow cracking, which uses vast dictionaries of data to let anyone reverse the process of creating hashes – the statistically unique codes that, among other duties, are used to obfuscate a user’s password. Last week, the trio went public with their service. Called RainbowCrack Online, the site allows anyone to pay a subscription fee and submit password hashes for cracking.

“Usually people think that a complex, but short, password is very secure, something like $FT%_3^,” said Travis, one of the founders of RainbowCrack Online, who asked that his last name not be used. “However, you will find that our tables handle that password quite easily.”

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Users know how to create good passwords, but they don’t

From Usability News’ “Password Security: What Users Know and What They Actually Do“:

A total of 328 undergraduate and graduate level college students from Wichita State University volunteered to participate in the survey, and were regular users of the Internet with one or more password protected accounts. Ages of the participants ranged from 18 to 58 years (M = 25.34). Thirteen cases were deleted due to missing data, resulting in 315 participants in the final data analysis. …

When asked what practices should be used in the creation and usage of passwords, the majority of respondents, 50.8% (160), were able to identify most of the password practices that are recommended for creating secure passwords (Tufts University, 2005), although 62.9% (198) failed to identify a practice that would result in the most secure password; using numbers and special characters in place of letters.

Differences between password practices users reported and the passwords practices they believe they should use included:

  • 73% (230) of respondents reported that they should change their passwords for accounts every three to six months, but 52.7% (166) responded that they “Never” change their password when not required.
  • 50.8% (160) of respondents reported that they should use special characters in their passwords, but only 4.8% (12) reported doing so.
  • 63.5% (200) of respondents reported that they should use seven or more characters in their passwords, but only 35.5% (112) indicated that they use this number of characters with any regularity.
  • 70.5% (222) of respondents indicated that personally meaningful words should not be used, but 49.8% (156) reported that they use this practice.
  • 68.3% (215) of respondents report that personally meaningful numbers should not be used in passwords, but 54.9% (173) reported using this practice. …

The majority of participants in the current study most commonly reported password generation practices that are simplistic and hence very insecure. Particular practices reported include using lowercase letters, numbers or digits, personally meaningful words and numbers (e.g., dates). It is widely known that users typically use birthdates, anniversary dates, telephone numbers, license plate numbers, social security numbers, street addresses, apartment numbers, etc. Likewise, personally meaningful words are typically derived from predictable areas and interests in the person’s life and could be guessed through basic knowledge of his or her interests. …

It would seem to be a logical assumption that the practices and behaviors users engage in would be related to what they think they should do in order to create secure passwords. This does not seem to be the case as participants in the current study were able to identify many of the recommended practices, despite the fact that they did not use the practices themselves.

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John the Ripper makes password cracking easy

From Federico Biancuzzi’s “John the Ripper 1.7, by Solar Designer“:

John the Ripper 1.7 also improves on the use of MMX on x86 and starts to use AltiVec on PowerPC processors when cracking DES-based hashes (that is, both Unix crypt(3) and Windows LM hashes). To my knowledge, John 1.7 (or rather, one of the development snapshots leading to this release) is the first program to cross the 1 million Unix crypts per second (c/s) boundary on a general-purpose CPU. Currently, John 1.7 achieves up to 1.6M c/s raw performance (that is, with no matching salts) on a PowerPC G5 at 2.7 GHz (or 1.1M c/s on a 1.8 GHz) and touches 1M c/s on the fastest AMD CPUs currently available. Intel P4s reach up to 800k c/s. (A non-public development version making use of SSE also reaches 1M c/s on an Intel P4 at 3.4 and 3.6 GHz. I intend to include that code into a post-1.7 version.)

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A brief history of backdoors

From Network Magazine:

Ken Thompson, a designer of the Unix OS, explained his magic password, a password that once allowed him to log in as any user on any Unix system, during his award acceptance speech at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) meeting in 1984. Thompson had included a backdoor in the password checking function that gets included in the login program. The backdoor would get installed in new versions of the Unix system because the compiler had Trojan Horse code that propagated the backdoor code to new versions of the compiler. Thompson’s magic password is the best known, and most complex in distribution, backdoor code.

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Crack Windows passwords in seconds

This is an oldie but still a goodie – or a baddie, if you use or depend on Windows. Back in 2003, researchers released tools that enable the cracking of Windows passwords in an average of 13.6 seconds. Not bad, not bad at all. CNET has a nice writeup titled Cracking Windows passwords in seconds, which explains that the best way to guard against the attack is to create passwords that use more than just alphanumeric items. In other words, read my SecurityFocus column from May 2004, Pass the Chocolate, which contains this advice: “… you should use a mix of at least three of these four things: small letters, capital letters, numbers, and symbols. If you can use all four, great, but at least use three of them.”

If you want to download and test the security of your Windows passwords, you can grab the software at Ophcrack. You can get source, as well as binaries for Windows and Linux. There’s even an online demo of the software, in which you can paste a hash of the password you’d like to crack and get back the actual password. Nice!

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