Speaking of passwords…

Wouldn’t it be quite logical to talk about passwords after user names? Most certainly. Trouble is, the subject is very, very large. Creating, storing, transmitting, verifying, updating, recovering, wiping… Did I get all of it? It is going to take a while to get through all of that, do you reckon? Let’s split the subject and talk about password storage now, as the subject that comes most often in the security discussions and in the news.

Speaking of which, some recent break-ins if you were not keeping track:

LinkedIn  – 6.5 million passwords stolen, Yahoo – 450 thousand passwords stolen, Android Forums – 1 million, Last.fm – 8 million, Nvidia – 400 thousand, eHarmony – 1.5 million, Billabong – 21 thousand, TechRadar … the list is going on and on.

Out of 8 million passwords in LinkedIn and Last.fm breach, “It took a user on the forum less than 2½ hours to crack 1.2 million of the hashed passwords, Ars Technica reported.”

Oops. Is that supposed to be so easy? Actually… no.

There are few easy rules for storing the passwords. First of all, never store passwords in clear, unencrypted, like Billabong did. You remember that any and every system was or will eventually be broken into. You have to assume that your password database will fall into wrong hands sooner or later. Your password database has to be prepared for that eventuality to look good in the eyes of the press.

So, when your password database is in the hands of the attackers, it has to defend itself. A database full of unencrypted passwords does not provide any defense of course. What about an encrypted database?

Well, since you have to be able to use the database, you have to decrypt it when you need it. So the system will have the key to the database somewhere. Since the attacker got hands onto the database, there is no reason why the attacker should not get the encryption keys at the same time. So this is definitely not improving the situation.

Secure hashes (as in the name of this blog) are the ultimate answer. The important thing about the hashes is that they do not require a use of a key and they can be easily computed only one way: from the clear piece of information into the hash. They cannot be reversed, one cannot easily compute the original piece of information from the hash. That’s why they are called one-way hashes.

The hashes were invented a long time ago and they were improving over the years. The old hashes are not secure anymore with the increases in the computing power. That’s what they talked about when they referred to recovering the plain text passwords – they computed passwords that will result in the hash that is in the database.

Finding the passwords then given a database of password hashes boils down to taking a password, computing its hash according to the algorithm used, and comparing it to the hashes stored in the database. When a match is found – we have a good password. This is where the cost of computing the hashes comes in. Older hashes are much faster, newer hashes are much slower. With the advent of rental cloud computing services this is becoming a small distinction though. All SHA-1 passwords of up to 6 characters in length could be brute forced in 49 minutes with the help of Amazon EC2 for a cost of $2 two years ago. And it’s getting cheaper and faster. So here is where the speed matters but it has the opposite effect. The hash, to be secure, must be a very, very slow one. Almost too slow to be useful at all would be a good start.

Even if the computer systems weren’t getting blistering fast compared to the blistering fast of five years ago all the time, a workaround was figured a long time ago. If you are prepared to invest in some large storage, you can compute slowly but surely an enormous amount of hashes and keep them somewhere. When the time comes, you just have to go and compare the hashes you computed in advance to the given hashes in the password database. This is called using rainbow tables. And it’s bloody effective.

Ok, ok, it is not all that gloomy. This fight is an old one and we have defenses. A very effective measure against the rainbow tables is to use a cryptographic salt. A salt is an additional piece of data supplied to the hash function together with the password. Since the attacker did not know the salt in advance, precomputed rainbow tables suddenly become useless. Great. Unfortunately, many sites use a fixed salt that is generated once and set in stone. This effectively makes rainbow tables useful again. One just has to compute them once with that salt again for the whole database. So the salt, to be useful, must be generated new for every password and stored together with the password.

So, finally, the answer is simple: a cryptographically strong, contemporary (as in “very, very slow”) one-way hash function with a randomly generated salt for every password. And anything deviating from that is just plain tomfoolery.

Related articles

• An Illustrated Guide to Cryptographic Hashes  by Steve Friedl
• Holy Hash! Yahoo! keeps passwords in clear! (tigrino.wordpress.com)
• Let’s talk about password storage (mozilla.org)
• 154 Billion Hashes per Second with Multiforcer Password Cracker (cyberarms.wordpress.com)
• How Your Passwords Are Stored on the Internet (and When Your Password Strength Doesn’t Matter) [Explainers] (lifehacker.com)