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Re:The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fi... by TeMPOraL on Sunday June 26, 2016 @02:23PM (#11981935)
> Also if it is the way I think it is, then you know that your passwords aren't hashed on their servers.

Only if the developers are extremely lazy. A proper implementation would precompute a series of hashes for different subsets of the password and store them in the database instead. Similar to how Facebook stores both the password and its reversed-case form as a convenience feature for people who forget to turn their CAPS LOCK off.

Re:The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fi... by boulos on Sunday June 26, 2016 @02:30PM (#11981978)
But how many subsets would you do? With enough of them (and particularly relative to password length) this would leak a lot about your password. For say an 8 character password, do these things ask you to enter more than 4 characters?
Re:The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fi... by TeMPOraL on Sunday June 26, 2016 @02:42PM (#11982029)
On my >10 character passwords (I generally don't use shorter passwords with banking sites, so I don't know how the system behaves for short passwords) they ask for ~11 characters. Of course the login box can, and often ends up, being longer than your actual password, so it doesn't visually reveal the actual character count of your password. In my case they usually end up asking for ~5-7 "real" characters.

I presume a good implementation hashes and salts each "sub-password" separately. Since it's the server that decides which subset it wants, I don't think it reduces the search space, unless the hashing/salting algorithm is vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis (which it may be, I don't know this aspect of state-of-the-art hashing functions).

Re:The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fi... by minitech on Monday June 27, 2016 @01:40AM (#11984371)
It's a huge detriment to security. You can break sets of 5-7 characters at a time and combine them instead of having to break the entire password at once.
Re:The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fi... by TeMPOraL on Monday June 27, 2016 @04:13AM (#11984805)
Seems like a tradeoff. What's more likely - that a bank loses its password database, or that some customers find themselves infected with keyloggers?

Also in any bank that's even remotely sane this is just one leg of a 2FA; often a kind of a "delayed" 2FA - where one factor is enough to get you mostly "read-only" access, and any important changes or wiring actual money requires one-time SMS codes.

Re:The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fi... by minitech on Monday June 27, 2016 @05:37PM (#11989712)
Any bank that's remotely sane with regards to website security (probably rather few of them) doesn't do this at all and uses standard forms of 2FA. This one doesn't even protect against keyloggers, because they can combine the characters from multiple logins to get the full password (guessing the remaining ones if necessary) and because the password might be reused somewhere else, and they try this at the expense of user convenience (counting characters is annoying) and security in the event of a leak involving password hashes (if they hashed them at all).
Re:The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fi... by jandrese on Monday June 27, 2016 @04:17PM (#11989134)
In today's environment? Probably the bank losing its password database.
Re:The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fi... by kevincox on Monday June 27, 2016 @02:53PM (#11988510)
I understand what you are saying, but I suspect that fb doesn't store multiple hashes but just recomputes the hash entered a couple of times on failure.