If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

Re:If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the p... by Someone on Thursday October 05, 2017 @03:05PM (#15411747)

I think that bug could easily slip through once, even with a test script. Let’s say the script says

  - enter P as password
  - enter H as hint
  - click “OK”
  - unmount the disk
  - mount it again
  - check that the dialog shows the hint H
  - enter P as the password
  ...

Now, if P isn’t obviously a password and H isn’t obviously a hint (let’s say P is ‘foo’, and H is ‘bar’), it takes only one slip of the mind to turn that “check that the dialog shows the hint H” into “check that the dialog shows the string you just entered as hint”, and from there, it’s only a tiny further slip to “yes, that’s a string I just entered”.

To me, it seems at least as likely that that gets past a tester once as it is that a programmer writes that bug.

It still should be highly unlikely to get throug multiple rounds of testing by multiple testers, though.

A better test description would use a more password-like value for P (say ‘tqbfjoald’) and a more hint-like value for H (‘quick and brown’), decreasing that risk.

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Re:If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the p... by mikestew on Thursday October 05, 2017 @03:23PM (#15411869)

A better test description would use a more password-like value for P (say ‘tqbfjoald’) and a more hint-like value for H (‘quick and brown’), decreasing that risk.

Maybe I expect too much, but a tester with any experience is going to use strings like "thePassword" and "theHint" to reduce those brain farts. One doesn't have to test software very long before discovering why using "test", "test" as the respective strings for that dialog will bite you.

I agree with your hypothesis, but it's one of those mistakes I'd expect out of a fresh-out-of-college person, and I would expect those folks to be testing, say, TextEdit and not security-sensitive pieces. But there are so many unknowns that I still reserve judgement. I'd just like to know what piece of the process broke down such that something like this gets out the door.

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Re:If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the p... by Someone on Thursday October 05, 2017 @04:45PM (#15412453)

I agree it shouldn’t happen, but in this case, the programmer presumably made (more or less) the same mistake, writing out a variable called password unencrypted, possibly after copying it to a variable or structure field called passwordhint.

Thinking of that, this may be an example of a copy-paste bug (https://www.viva64.com/en/a/0068/), where the programmer wrote

   strcpy(&r.password    , &encryptedpassword);
   strcpy(&r.passwordhint, &password);

instead of

   strcpy(&r.password    , &encryptedpassword);
   strcpy(&r.passwordhint, &passwordhint);

(Hopefully using the safer strncpy, but that’s orthogonal to this argument)

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