Password recovery mechanisms – Part 2

Passwords remain the main means of authentication on the internet. People often forget their passwords and then they have to recover their access to the website services through some kind of mechanism. We try to make that so-called “password recovery” simple and automated, of course. There are several ways to do it, all of them but one are wrong. Let’s see how it is done.

If you did not read Part 1 – Secret questions, I recommend you do so before reading on.

Part 2 – Secondary channel

A second way to do recovery is to use a secondary channel for authentication. Once authenticated on this secondary channel, the password for the primary channel can be changed. The secondary channel may be slower and more cumbersome but since it is used rarely it is not a problem.

You could ask the person to call user support. The user support would ask some questions for personal information and compare the answers with what they have on file. That would effectively reduce the system to the “secret questions” described in Part 1. There are better (and cheaper) ways to do it.

Historically, the server usually stores the e-mail address of the user provided at registration. That is what becomes the secondary channel. Although it is still over the Internet, but capturing the e-mails on their way to the intended recipient is not a trivial task unless you control one of the nodes through which the e-mail would be routed.

Originally the passwords were stored in plaintext at the server and the user could request the password to be e-mailed. Some services still operate like that. The notorious Mailman list server e-mails you your plaintext password once a month in case you forgot it. That is a convenient way but has a bit of a security problem, of course. Should the password database be recovered by an attacker, all passwords to all accounts are immediately known. On the other hand, it has the advantage that user passwords are not really changed, so if someone requests a password reminder, the original subscriber will receive an e-mail and that’s all.

The inventive thought then went to the idea of hashing the passwords for storage, which is a great idea in itself and protects the passwords in case the database gets stolen. It has a side effect that suddenly the password is not known to the server anymore. Only the hash is. That is sufficient for the authentication but isn’t very helpful if you want to mail out a password reminder. So, someone had a bright idea that the password reminder should become a password reset. And what they did is: when a user requests, the server generates a new password, sends it to the user, and changes the hash in the database to the new password’s hash. All secure and … very prone to the denial of service attacks. Basically, anyone may now request a password reset for any users at will and that user’s password will get changed. Very annoying.

So we went further and decided that changing the password is not such a good idea. What we do then is make a separate database of single-use tokens. When a user requests a password change, we generate a unique random token, keep the token in the database and send it out to the user. If user did not request a token, the user need not react, the password was not changed and the token will harmlessly expire some time later. When the user needs a password change, he provides the token back to the service in a password change form (or through a clicked URL) and that allows us to perform this secondary authentication and then change the primary password. And that’s the way to do it.

There are variations where the secondary channel can be an SMS, an automated telephone call, or even an actual letter from the bank. But the important thing is that those messages only provide a token that verifies your identity on the secondary channel before allowing a security relevant operation on the primary channel.

Next, we will look at an example procedure for a website in Part 3.