How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331”

Re:How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” by nknighthb on Tuesday May 28, 2013 @02:27AM (#5778465)

If the contents of the device can be dumped, the problem remains. If not, you have no copies of your database, so when (not if) the device or the server it's connected to fails, your site is down, and once you've brought it back up, all of your users must go through a password reset process.

That one server/device is now a single point of failure and a bottleneck in processing logins.

You're also still relying on the security of a computer, just a special-purpose one.

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Re:How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” by chongli on Tuesday May 28, 2013 @02:32AM (#5778486)

I didn't say anything about reliability or single points of failure. I merely pointed out that it was possible to separate the salt from the hashes and gain security that way. Whether this is practical or not depends on how important security is to you.

And yes, it would not be possible to dump the contents of the devices.

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Re:How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” by nknighthb on Tuesday May 28, 2013 @05:39AM (#5779063)

The proposal is fundamentally impractical, and thus not a "security gain" in any meaningful sense. It's the equivalent of preventing cipher algorithm breaks by using nothing but one-time pads.

It's also theoretically impure in any case, as you've done nothing but add an additional peripheral to the computer. You're seeking obfuscation, not real cryptographic integrity.

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Re:How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” by rdl on Tuesday May 28, 2013 @08:29AM (#5779523)

No, using an HSM to store a secret is done widely (in banking, for PINs), and it's entirely possible to implement them in a way where individual device failures can be mitigated.

The only issue is cost of HSMs; they're about $20k/ea right now, since there are only two significant vendors, and they're not widely used.

If someone wanted to do "HSM for general purpose web login, to eliminate the DoS potential of scrypt, and the brute force hash db problem of anything else, and the idiocy of plaintext", the price could probably drop down to $500 or less.

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Re:How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” by chongli on Tuesday May 28, 2013 @07:32AM (#5779326)

>It's also theoretically impure in any case, as you've done nothing but add an additional peripheral to the computer. You're seeking obfuscation, not real cryptographic integrity.

It's not obfuscation. The peripheral has a far smaller attack surface than a server. This is real security, even if it comes at a cost of reliability (though one can envision ways of fixing this, too).

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Re:How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” by nknighthb on Tuesday May 28, 2013 @07:51AM (#5779375)

It's operational/system security. That's not the same thing as cryptographic security.

Stop trying to patch a hole that isn't there. Salt is not secret data. If you want to protect the hash with secret data, take A1kmm's advice and use the smart card to encrypt it. But don't call that a salt, because it fundamentally is not one.

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