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Old 13th November 2013
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jggimi jggimi is offline
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Default Cryptanalysis: a stunning display of bad security design

Some background

Triple DES, commonly referred to as 3DES, is a perfectly acceptable and well understood stream cipher. It was one of the algorithms I studied when I took a cryptography course last year.

During that course, Prof. Boneh hammered into us that as cryptology amateurs, we should never desgin our own cyrptographic solutions, even when using well understood primitiives. Such as 3DES, or AES, or SHA256. Mistakes in design can permit an attacker to obtain partial plaintext, partial keys, or critical information permitting them to derive partial plaintext or keys.


The news

You may have heard the news that Adobe disclosed a loss of 3 million encrypted passwords. You may also have heard that they underreported the loss by a factor of 20 -- that the password database that was published online actually lists 150 million userids, Email addresses, password hints and encrypted passwords. You might also have received an Email from Adobe in October about the disclosure, as I did.

The 3DES cipher is excellent, for its intended purpose. Its choice for static information, or data at rest, was excoriable. Its implementation in Adobe's database was nothing short of excrement.

This morning, there was an article on Bruce Schneier's blog, that pointed to a fascinating cryptanalysis by Paul Ducklin, who contributes to the Naked Security column at Sophos. His column, Anatomy of a password disaster - Adobe's giant-sized cryptographic blunder, is intended for the lay reader, and is clear, understandable, and compelling. You do not need to have a background in cryptography to understand it.

Everyone who uses the Internet should read it.

Don't read it just to enjoy Adobe's ineptitude, which is devastatingly, mind bogglingly fun to read about and understand.

Read it because there will be future ill-conceived solutions, and these could be solutions we devise ourselves.

Read it because we all need to understand that we never know how well protected any information is, in the event it is disclosed. Whether that information is in the trust of others, or our own.

And, read it because we should all be cognizant of just how easy cryptanalysis is when the same key is reused for the same information.
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Old 14th November 2013
daemonfowl daemonfowl is offline
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Hi jggimi ! thanks for the interesting thread
Outliars pretend to care about users privacy ..

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013...ails-on-adobe/
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013...phic-defaults/
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Old 14th November 2013
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Perhaps I was not sufficiently clear. Anyone can make mistakes that unknowingly puts privacy at risk. Not just Adobe. It does not matter if we trust another entity, or if we trust only ourselves.

Example:

A privacy advocate ensures that her personal connections to the Internet are always through Tor. She keeps all of her software up to date and watches for security announcements that affect any of her components: OS, Tor, browser, and other tools. She also uses the P2P protocol BitTorrent from her main workstation. It does not work very well, and she is unaware that the BitTorrent protocol publishes her real IP address, eliminating the privacy she works hard to maintain.

Example:

An OpenBSD user sets up a small application server, and sets up PF rules that pass traffic to all of his daemons, blocking everything else. He thinks he has secured his system, because he is using OpenBSD with PF, both of which surely enhance his security. He is unaware that his pass rules have exposed his new application server's internal database to the Internet.

Example:

An OpenBSD user gets an Email from Adobe, telling him that they had a security breach. He doesn't know when it occurred, or the extent of the breach, but the userid was one he used commonly, and he had been using the same easy to remember password on a lot of his network accounts that did not have personal information within them. He spent the next week changing passwords on all of his network accounts anyway, and he is still not sure if he got all of them, more than a month later.
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Old 14th November 2013
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It could be worse. A large Dutch telecom (KPN) once claimed their passwords were encrypted with UTF-8 :-)

I've once had my password read to me over the phone by someone checking some basic information (name, email, address, and apparently also password)... The (repeated) attempts to actually pronounce my random passwords were quite amusing.

A few months ago, there was quite some hubub in the Netherlands because a journalist had `hacked' a medical system because a patient had overheard a password.

The point is, whenever you use a password, *anywhere*, it's best to always assume your password is public.
Just storing the passwords securely is no guarantee. I could, for example, easily modify the code for these forums to email me your password when you login.

The best thing you can do is:
1) Use a password manager & unique passwords
2) *Always* use a password manager & unique passwords!

This won't actually stop misuse, but it would certainly limit the scope of misuse.
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Old 14th November 2013
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Quote:
2) *Always* use a password manager & unique passwords!
That long time OpenBSD user mentioned in my third example is doing that now.
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Old 14th November 2013
shep shep is offline
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Quote:
2) *Always* use a password manager & unique passwords!
I moved away from complex desktops (Gnome/KDE) with keyring based password managers.

Any suggestions about the available password managers in OpenBSD with a window manager like FluxBox or OpenBox?
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Old 14th November 2013
daemonfowl daemonfowl is offline
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Hi shep ! I was about to ask as well .. then , is keepassx convenient ?
Thanks jggimi ! your examples are to the point but some (I mean myself) learn too late ..
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Old 14th November 2013
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If you want a basic solution, you can do this in vim:

Code:
:set cryptmethod=blowfish
:X
:w ~/passwords
Note the default cryptmethod is *not* secure, you *need* to set it to blowfish!

Don't forget to backup (no matter how you store your passwords), you will *not* be happy if you lose it.
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Old 15th November 2013
daemonfowl daemonfowl is offline
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Thanks Carpetsmoker !

Quoting keepassx wikipedia page :
Quote:
KeePass encrypts the database with the AES or Twofish symmetric ciphers. AES is the default option, and Twofish is available in 1.x, but is not available in version 2.x. However, a separate plugin provides Twofish as an encryption algorithm.
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Old 10th February 2014
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I wrote a few functions to make Vim work as a password manager ... I cleaned that up a bit, and released it as a program of sorts.

http://code.arp242.net/password-bunny

This is ridiculous simple, but it's the best password manager I've used so far...
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Old 10th February 2014
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker View Post
Great Monty Python references
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Old 10th February 2014
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jggimi View Post
You may have heard the news that Adobe disclosed a loss of 3 million encrypted passwords. You may also have heard that they underreported the loss by a factor of 20 -- that the password database that was published online actually lists 150 million userids, Email addresses, password hints and encrypted passwords. You might also have received an Email from Adobe in October about the disclosure, as I did.
It's sad that it's Adobe being so incompetent, but of course it's rampant.

I know a place that not only uses 3DES for passwords, but keeps the key in the text of the executable. In case that's not a big enough hole, it provides an API function that will authenticate you if you provide the cipher text of your password (think if passwd had a flag where you could provide the ciphertext in master.passwd and that would be as good as typing your password). When I challenged someone on that I was told it was to avoid having users keep their unencrypted password in a file on their machine's file system for programs that run automated without a chance for a login prompt. Heh. Challenge them a little more and you soon get, "well our systems are only meant for internal networks anyway." So let's be honest about it and not have authentication at all.

I'm not pretending to be any kind of expert, but when even I could break your system, you're pretty pathetic.
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