Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

Re:Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother by Santosh83 on Saturday March 10, 2018 @09:33PM (#16561422)

Everyone suggesting to use a bigger and/or more random string are missing the point that your average user won't do that. As a sort of computer nerd, my master password is 46 characters from the full set of letters, numbers, symbols and in both cases. It took me a week to memorise it flawlessly. Do we really think a regular user will take this effort? Instead they will continue using their simple, short passwords (if they set a MP at all. Most won't), which is why the article is right that a resistant hashing algo like argon2 can only improve security. The issue is not protecting users whose systems have malware. That's obviously a battle lost before its even begun. The issue is someone gaining access to your password DB and then being able to brute-force within reasonable time, which the current key derivation allows and a stronger algorithm can plug that weakness. Presumably the changes are not complicated or labour intensive, so the fact it is an open bug since almost a decade is unfortunate.

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Re:Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother by stouset on Saturday March 10, 2018 @11:25PM (#16561689)

For what it’s worth, assuming an alphabet of 72 characters (52 letters, 10 digits, 10 symbols), this is ridiculously higher entropy than a 128-bit encryption key.

There is no absolutely no need for your password to be this long. Even just twenty characters is within spitting distance of 2^128.

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Re:Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother by Buge on Sunday March 11, 2018 @12:26AM (#16561818)

>For what it’s worth, assuming an alphabet of 72 characters (52 letters, 10 digits, 10 symbols), this is ridiculously higher entropy than a 128-bit encryption key.

No it's not. User-chosen data is rarely random, so it's safe to say that Santosh83's password is not random. This article claims English has 1.46 bits of entropy per character[1]. If Santosh83's password is regular English, then it would have ~105 bits of entropy.

>Even just twenty characters is within spitting distance of 2^128

Someone[2] sent bitcoins to a brainwallet secured only by the phrase "it was the best of times" (24 characters). The bitcoins were stolen in 4 seconds. 20 characters is not enough. You need to do actual entropy analysis. And don't use quotes from anywhere. Crackers crawl the internet and build databases of all the quotes they find online. This tends to include book quotes, movie quotes, etc.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1996-teahan.pdf

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ndsxi/a_test_of_b...

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Re:Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother by Dylan16807 on Sunday March 11, 2018 @03:20AM (#16562030)

If we take the post at face value, it's strong overkill. Face value means that "46 characters from the full set" is even vaguely descriptive of the password.

Sure, perhaps it's just a phrase or something, but once you start calling part of a post a lie where do you stop? I'd rather not get into such a mess.

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Re:Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother by Buge on Sunday March 11, 2018 @03:37AM (#16562069)

I never said any part of the post was a lie. Most people's passwords are not random. The word "password" doesn't mean random. So there isn't a reason to assume that the password is random. xkcd's recommended password is 25 characters, and 44 bits of entropy. Extrapolating that out would mean a 46 character password would be 81 bits of entropy.

Yes, "from the full set" likely means that it's higher than 1.46 bits/character. But it doesn't mean it's much more.

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Re:Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother by stouset on Sunday March 11, 2018 @05:02AM (#16562261)

At the point where someone has a 46-character password consisting of uppercase, lowercase, digits, and symbols that takes a week to memorize, I think it’s a fair guess that it’s random.

The average password isn’t random. But GP was not describing anything remotely close to an average password in the first place.

Turns out (according to GP) it isn’t random. But I stand by my point that it was a reasonable assumption given the available data.

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Re:Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother by Santosh83 on Sunday March 11, 2018 @04:40AM (#16562225)

Perhaps, but it is not completely random. It is composed of the first letters from the words making up a phrase (which by the way is not from a poem/prose or any existing writing; entirely my own), some upper & some lowercase, prefixed and suffixed with a sequence of numbers and symbols. So it has much more order than a random sequence of 46 symbols, but unless you keylog/phish me or something like that, I don't believe it can be brute-forced anytime soon, which is why I went for a (over?)long, unique phrase.

KeePass reports it as having 222 bits entropy although I don't know how accurate an analysis that is.

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Re:Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother by stouset on Sunday March 11, 2018 @05:05AM (#16562269)

That’s fair. My assumption was that it was random.

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Re:Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother by singularity2001 on Sunday March 11, 2018 @03:45AM (#16562094)

also you can your save your one long master password on a yubi key so you never have to type it.

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