News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi... by gruez on Friday June 05, 2020 @09:20AM (#23428150)
>This only proves they aren't encrypting passwords on the fly. And have, and do, the ability to read your password.

Not really, even if you have password hashing, the password is always in the clear when you're attempting an login or you're setting it. They can simply run the detection system then, without loss of security.

Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi... by tomato2juice on Friday June 05, 2020 @09:35AM (#23428321)
> the password is always in the clear when you're attempting an login or you're setting it.

Not anymore. Modern logins should use something like SRP, which doesn't send a password over the wire on every login.

http://srp.stanford.edu/

Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi... by jaywalk on Friday June 05, 2020 @09:58AM (#23428577)
From http://srp.stanford.edu/demo/ "This demo requires a browser that supports both JavaScript and Java."

There's nothing modern about a system that requires Java in the browser. No thanks.

Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi... by erinaceousjones on Friday June 05, 2020 @10:18AM (#23428826)
> The SRP JavaScript demo has been tested successfully under the following browser environments: > > Mozilla 1.x, Netscape 6, 7 > Netscape 4.x - JDK 1.1.5 w/bignum support required > Internet Explorer WindowsNT 4.0 (IE4)

I have a feeling that the page referenced is not so "modern" :-)

BUT, that doesn't make it a necessarily bad protocol for modern browsers to be implementing, i.e. as part of their "identity management" stuff, like Firefox Sync [1].

Remember that the Stanford Java applet implementation was purely academic, intended as a demonstration and developed at a time where JavaScript was too limited for the large number arithmetic they wanted to do (no BigInteger equivalent).

That purely academic implementation does not invalidate the work itself, or future implementations thereof.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/AttachedServices/KeyServer...

Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi... by tomato2juice on Friday June 05, 2020 @05:16PM (#23434069)
That's an ancient demo, I guess I should have linked a modern implementation sorry. More info here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Remote_Password_protoco...
Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi... by amaccuish on Friday June 05, 2020 @10:35AM (#23429015)
SRP is good. Apple uses it for HomeKit. The HomeKit pins you use are authenticated by SRP. The page is just a really old demo, the protocol itself is still sound and some have come up with variations for more security.

Also it has the ability to generate a session key.

Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi... by tialaramex on Friday June 05, 2020 @01:02PM (#23430765)
SRP is... weird.

The good news is that using SRP is definitely not worse than DH as a key agreement protocol.

The bad news is you probably already have a nice modern ECDH key agreement protocol, you wanted secure passwords and the proof for how SRP does that involves a lot of flailing about. Flailing about which so far reached SRP version 6a

If browsers and backend stacks and everything else was one config change from doing SRP 6a tomorrow it's tempting to say hey, go ahead it can't hurt.

But in fact SRP is very niche, so it makes at least as much sense to try to deploy OPAQUE or other things that have a clearer security rationale.

Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi... by Spivak on Friday June 05, 2020 @11:17AM (#23429508)
It's an educational demo for students to learn about the protocol ya nincompoop. The actual protocol is language independent and only really requires that the client do I teeny bit of lifting.

On any client where you can run code you can authenticate without ever sending your plaintext password over the wire. And on clients where you can't run code you can still accept the plaintext password as a fallback.

Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi... by ufmace on Friday June 05, 2020 @02:55PM (#23432380)
Dude what? I don't think anybody uses that. I've never heard of it before. Just because somebody created a thing doesn't mean it's safe or secure or that we should all switch to it before it gets some solid testing and validation under its belt.

I don't see any plugins or libraries to add to any of the huge number of exiting authentication libraries. Has it even been subject to a hostile security audit? Has it been put in a place where it will face a serious state-sponsored attack and performed at least as well as existing systems?

Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi... by tomato2juice on Friday June 05, 2020 @05:15PM (#23434054)
> Dude what? I don't think anybody uses that. I've never heard of it before.

Ya, the first time I heard of it I had the same reaction, but it's legitimate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Remote_Password_protoco... That page is quite old, but lots of bodies use it: http://srp.stanford.edu/links.html

Amazon uses it in a service: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/am...

Also, as another commenter said, Apple uses it in Homekit.

Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi... by gpm on Friday June 05, 2020 @09:37AM (#23428341)
Should, yes, probably.

Does anyone actually, no, not that I've seen.

Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi... by anaganisk on Friday June 05, 2020 @10:18AM (#23428836)
Requires Java? Was this modern in 2009?
Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi... by yardie on Friday June 05, 2020 @10:10AM (#23428729)
I've written many webapps in my life time with browser and server-side validation. Encrypting is the very first step once the form is submitted. We never knew the password the only thing the library could do is validate it for minimum requirements and compare to stored hashes, that's it. If your password was "CannibalisticBabyRaper42!" as far as the server is concerned it met all the requirements.
Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi... by davedx on Friday June 05, 2020 @10:15AM (#23428787)
> Encrypting is the very first step once the form is submitted

I've never worked on a webapp that did this, though I have heard of it. What's the point, really, if you're using SSL? If you don't trust the server then don't use the service

Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi... by Retric on Friday June 05, 2020 @10:54AM (#23429237)
Server side, the more you pass around a clear text password the more likely you are to have a security issue. So it’s very good practice to immediately hash any submitted passwords to avoid them ending up in logs accidentally etc.

It’s pointless client side. Trusting the clients hashing of a password is the same as using a clear text password. Aka some admin or hacker learns the hash they can use a modified client to send the hash directly.

Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi... by tzs on Friday June 05, 2020 @12:52PM (#23430625)
It's only pointless to hash client side if the server does not also hash.

Hashing on the client what the user actually types and sending that hash to the server which then treats that hash as the password can help in the case of users that construct similar passwords for different sites.

A user who uses passwords of the form "<site>.19%Gkm19^GB", for example, would normal be sending "gmail.19%Gkm19^GB" gmail, "twitter.19%Gkm19^GB" to Twitter, and so on. If anyone one of those gets compromised there is a good chance they all will be.

If the sites had a first step of client siding hashing then the password that gmail sees is "0d156132c43e7110b5d678eafd7117b5a4649fbf" and the one twitter sees is "cfd9d7f62b92eb025a242bc860d41aae60ebeacf". One of those getting compromised on the wire or at the server doesn't put the other at risk.

Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi... by Retric on Friday June 05, 2020 @09:16PM (#23435925)
If you accept that someone could compromise the web server but be unable to modify the website sent then sure. More generally if you don’t trust the other end you should not be using passwords.
Re:WeChat permanently closes account after user sets offensi... by yardie on Friday June 05, 2020 @12:18PM (#23430223)
If you're using SSL the password is encrypted in transit. Once it reaches the server it needs to be to encrypted at rest. When I see billion dollar companies with an ungodly IT budget not do something basic like salt and hash passwords in the database I have to wonder how they could miss something so basic.