Now that you mention it I do see a peacock almost ever time I go through
Nambe.

Cody Smith


On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 10:51 AM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote:

> As a quick followup:
> - I use 1password.  Why?  To collect a list of my logins.  Most of us do
> not know half of the logins we have!  This lets me at least spend an
> afternoon updating all my passwords if I want to.  1P seems OK and works
> well in my ecology.
>
> - I use 2-factor with google and their app.  And if a site lets me login
> w/ OAuth, I try to use google.  A few more ISPs are using 2-factor and if
> they are easy to use, I may try them too.  Main issue is pin; most sms it
> to you but dongles abound and I think I'll avoid them.
>
> - Where possible I use pub/priv key crypto.  My hosting service.  My home
> computers, servers and NAS, ssh sites.  I wish I could use it on my router,
> router attacks are on the rise.
>
>    -- Owen
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 10:21 AM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>> Ray, you'd have a far better take on passwords, and security of all sorts
>> than most of us, love your input on this.
>>
>> So here's an observation:
>>
>> Passwords are Dead.  Just move along and we'll come back with a better
>> solution after the commercial.
>>
>>
>> Why?
>> 1 - To be secure, you depend on the ISP to be secure. That's OK, but does
>> fail often.
>>
>> 2 - Apparently length of passwords is the high order bit for
>> crackibility. We humans dislike typing 20 character passwords, especially
>> on our phones, and its extremely likely to be miss-typed at least once,
>> probability of typo goes up with each keystroke.
>>
>> 3 - We are also instructed to have a different password for each login.
>>  Humans simply cannot do that, they are limited.  Thus they resort to a
>> formula like two phrases with a 3-4 character difference in the middle,
>> with some significance like "azn" or "books" for amazon.
>>
>> 4 - Most ISPs have their own rules for passwords, and likely any formula
>> will fail on a percentage of them.  Thus a formula will only work part of
>> the time.  Maybe there is a subset that most ISPs accept?  I found UNM, and
>> my bank, for example, failed to accept a formula I tried.
>>
>> 5 - This leads to keepass, 1password etc to remember all your passwords
>> for you.  Silly, but still appears reasonable.  But they typically fail in
>> certain situations.  Ex: they are designed for browser use so are
>> plugins/bookmarklets.  But what if you have a phone "app".  Won't work.  So
>> you have to do stupid tricks to go to the pw app and cut/paste.
>>
>> 6 - The latest trend to improve this is two-fold:
>>     6.1: Reduce number of logins: Use OAuth to have just a few accounts
>> that are very secure.  As soon as twitter, google, facebook, moz, yahoo,
>> ... and the rest of the "standard ISPs" all have OAuth (or equivalent), and
>> are used by the vast majority of the other sites (forums, stores, ..) we
>> have reduced the complexity of the user.  Probably will work with all
>> non-creditcard sites.
>>     6.2: 2-factor: How make more secure?  So far 2-factor works out
>> pretty well.  It would require a standard pin generator, google's is pretty
>> effective.  Have to do this to reduce the pile of silly physical pin
>> generators.
>>
>> I'm not sure this will work, its too complicated for most people.  We
>> might be able to have a single pin dongle for 2-factor, could help.  Thus
>> far 2-factor for me has been the best, and I use that account via OAuth for
>> all the forums, mail lists etc that accept that.  Even stores as long as
>> they don't keep the credit card info.
>>
>> The fallback is a password keeper as mentioned above.  But do you really
>> want it to keep all your passwords?  You're dead without it (travel etc)
>> and it simply doesn't work in all situations (apps vs browser) and its a
>> bit creepy to depend on a computer program for all your security.
>>
>> Sigh.
>>
>>    -- Owen
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 5:16 PM, Parks, Raymond <[email protected]>wrote:
>>>
>>>> The addition of a salt to a password makes rainbow tables much less
>>>> effective because it makes the table space larger, even trading off chain
>>>> length for convergence.  However, rainbow tables are no longer the thing -
>>>> with multi-GPU setups, password crackers just brute force passwords.
>>>>  Basically, the sequence is:
>>>>
>>>> 1. Using a large (20 million word) multiple language (but standard
>>>> ASCII) dictionary derived from text sources across the WWW, hash the words
>>>> in that dictionary with variants (leet-speak, other substitutions, plurals,
>>>> added numbers, 8 for "ate", et cetera), and compare the outputs to the
>>>> captured password file.  Salt is basically a variant that can be accounted
>>>> for - extra random characters.
>>>>
>>>> 2.  If some passwords are of the type you dislike, then those can be
>>>> brute-forced almost as fast as rainbow tables can be calculated.  Salt is
>>>> irrelevant in this process, other than making the effective number of bytes
>>>> longer.
>>>>
>>>> In the Ars articles, Step 1 seems to get as much as 90% of self-chosen
>>>> passwords in a matter of hours.  The practitioners in the Ars articles
>>>> don't go on to Step 2, but I would expect that to take less than a week.
>>>>  If the hash algorithm is captured along with the passwords, then the
>>>> cracker has the advantage of knowing whether the web-site uses salt.
>>>>  Operating systems, of course, are studied off-line to determine the
>>>> algorithm and use of salt.
>>>>
>>>>  Ray Parks
>>>> Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
>>>> V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
>>>> NIPR: [email protected]
>>>> SIPR: [email protected] (send NIPR reminder)
>>>> JWICS: [email protected] (send NIPR reminder)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Nov 18, 2013, at 11:48 AM, cody dooderson wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I find passwords really hard to remember. Especially those sites that
>>>> require numbers, symbols,uppercase, and lower case characters. I personally
>>>> would rather use a 20 character all lowercase 
>>>> password<http://preshing.com/20110811/xkcd-password-generator/>than an 8 
>>>> character mixed symbol password. As a result keep a document, in
>>>> the cloud, with all of my passwords stored in plain text. Many of these
>>>> passwords I could care less if someone cracked.
>>>> Also, I was under the impression that salting prevents the use of rainbow
>>>> tables <https://www.freerainbowtables.com/>.
>>>>
>>>> Cody Smith
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 11:28 AM, Parks, Raymond <[email protected]>wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> WRT password cracking - Dan Goodin has a good series of articles on
>>>>> password cracking at Ars Technica.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/how-i-became-a-password-cracker/
>>>>>
>>>>> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how-crackers-make-minced-meat-out-of-your-passwords/
>>>>>
>>>>> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/how-the-bible-and-youtube-are-fueling-the-next-frontier-of-password-cracking/
>>>>>
>>>>> TL;DR - Current GPU-based password cracking using 20-million word
>>>>> dictionaries make truly random passwords below 14 characters and nearl all
>>>>> pass-phrases susceptible to cracking in a relatively short time.
>>>>>
>>>>> On a related subject, roughly 75% of websites store passwords as
>>>>> nothing more complicated than simple, unsalted MD5 hashes.  This is almost
>>>>> as easy to break as as NTLM.
>>>>>
>>>>> Salt makes the initial crack more difficult, but if the same salt is
>>>>> used for all hashes, then subsequent cracks ignore it.
>>>>>
>>>>> WRT the use of PII - it's sold on various markets, correlated in a
>>>>> "big data" manner with other exposures, and, if enough information is
>>>>> available and the person's credit score is high enough, is used for credit
>>>>> attacks.  In some cases, if banking information is correlated, the
>>>>> collection is used for banking attacks.  If there is poor correlation but
>>>>> an email or FQDN is in the information, then the data may be used as a
>>>>> target list.
>>>>>
>>>>> Ray Parks
>>>>> Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager
>>>>> V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084
>>>>> NIPR: [email protected]
>>>>> SIPR: [email protected] (send NIPR reminder)
>>>>> JWICS: [email protected] (send NIPR reminder)
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Nov 18, 2013, at 10:12 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> A forum I belong to has been hacked, including personal info as well
>>>>> as passwords.
>>>>>
>>>>> How do they use this information?
>>>>>
>>>>> I presume they try the hash function on all combinations of possible
>>>>> passwords.  (Naturally optimized for faster convergence).  They see a
>>>>> match, i.e. a letter combination resulting in the given hash of the
>>>>> password.
>>>>>
>>>>> If they crack one password, does that make cracking the rest any
>>>>> easier?
>>>>>
>>>>> And does "salt" simply increase the difficulty, and indeed can it be
>>>>> deduced, as above, by cracking a single password?
>>>>>
>>>>> .. or is it all quite different from this!
>>>>>
>>>>>    -- Owen
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>
>
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