Information Safety Basics

You have a computer.
You can install software.
Four things you can do to improve your personal safety.

I recently gave a short presentation at the SkillShare Fair at CoCo, where I spend time working and writing. I pitched it as “The top 4 things you can do to keep your computer safe and secure.” Although the group attending was small, I had a great time, and learned from the participants. It was a test run for a class I’m developing to teach basic computer safety, blending both my experiences giving security advice to friends & family and my concept of Information Safety.

Here is a copy of the slides I used. I mentioned specific products in my talk, since they’re representative of the solutions I like for the typical risks most computer users face – those are listed below.

• Backups – Mac: Time Machine
• Backups – Mac & Windows: CrashPlan
• Updates – Mac: MacUpdate
• Updates – Windows: Secunia Personal Software Inspector
• Anti-Virus – Mac: Sophos Anti-Virus
• Anti-Virus – Windows: Microsoft Security Essentials
• Passwords – Mac & Windows: 1Password or Lastpass

Password Security Revisited

In my article, “Why Password Rotation is Bad,” I made the case that rotating passwords offers no security benefits, while making them harder for people to use. I stand by my assertion that passwords are hard to use, and rotation only diminishes usability, but I can now say that on a system that implements a password hashing algorithm like bcrypt or PBKDF2, in some cases, password rotation can effectively defeat brute-force attacks, but little protection against dictionary attacks.

bcrypt and PBKDF2 (Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2) work in essentially the same way – instead of salting and hashing the password once, the process is done repeatedly, an arbitrary number of times. (scrypt is a newer alternative that is specifically designed to further resist brute-force attacks) Although adding iterations doesn’t add to the cryptographic strength, it does increase the computing time required to calculate the hash. By increasing the calculation time, we can make password cracking more difficult. Instead of being able to test hundreds of millions of passwords per second, we can slow the attacker to ten per second (at least on one machine with no specialized hardware). The defender can choose a target time for how long it takes to calculate a single hash, and adjust the number of iterations accordingly. The beauty of this approach is that, failing a major breakthrough in mathematics, the number of iterations can be increased over time as computing power increases to keep the calculation time constant. Users’ password hashes can be silently upgraded when the number of iterations increases, so that calc times stay constant for legacy hashes.

Practically speaking, this means figuring out how long to make your passwords becomes an exercise in comparing relative computing power of attacker and defender.

Analysis

For my analysis, I assumed a password has time of 100 ms; this is a reasonable target, as a tenth of a second isn’t going to have much of a negative impact on user experience when logging in. An attacker calculating hashes at the same rate can perform 10 attempts per second, although they could apply additional horsepower to increase the cracking rate. Below are a couple of tables showing the number of days to brute-force a password at a given rate.

Lowercase Letters Only

Number of days to brute-force crack a password of a given length.

Uppercase, Lowercase, and Numbers

Number of days to brute-force crack a password of a given length.

Realistically, hashes only have to withstand attack long enough for the defender to detect that the hash database has been compromised, after which the passwords are all changed or invalidated. If passwords are set to rotate once per year, or if you assume the majority of attacks will be detected within a year, that leads to some interesting conclusions:

Password length required to resist an attack for 1 year (365 days or more).

Three types of attackers are considered, an Average attacker who can check 100x as many passwords per second as the defender, a Strong attacker with 100,000 times capacity, and a Massive attacker with 100 million times capacity. For reference, the largest Botnet on record, Bredolab, had an estimated 30 million systems.

For an Average attacker, any 8-character password will resist a brute-force attack for a year. A “PCI-compliant” 8-character strong password will resist even a Strong attacker for a year. Extending the length to 10 will pretty much prevent any non-government sponsored attack; even a Massive attacker would take 26 years to exhaust the password space (note that some passwords would be found more quickly).

This simple analysis aligns with work done by the developers of scrypt: by their estimates, (p. 14) it would take $130K worth of custom-fabricated 2002 hardware to crack an 8-character bcrypt password and $4.8 million worth to crack an 8-character scrypt password. (Keep in mind these are educated guesses for building ASICs tailored to cracking)

Putting this all together, adding bcrypt (or better yet, scrypt) to contemporary password policies that are already in place at most large companies (8 character, complex password) will protect password hashes against most attackers. Password rotation does improve security, since it puts an upper limit on how long a stolen hash is valid for, but if you assume that password database breaches will be detected in a reasonable time period (12-24 months), then rotation is probably unnecessary. When complexity is not mandatory, even an 8-character all-lowercase password will hold up against an Average attacker.

Unfortunately, bcrypt/scrypt provides little protection against dictionary attacks. Even at 10 attempts per second, an attacker can try 1 million passwords per day; bad passwords will still be guessed very quickly. To defend against this, the only practical approach is to run a dictionary attack against your password database. Some systems allow this to be done at the time the password is set – even a relatively small dictionary, along with good guidance on how to select an acceptable password should provide reasonable protection.

Recommendations

So, to sum up:

• Use scrypt, or a similar password hashing algorithm.
• Set the number of iterations so that hashes take approximately 100 ms, and adjust this value over time as computing power increases.
• Use the same password policy you have today (8 character complex passwords).
• Run dictionary checks against passwords as they are selected.

If you follow all this advice, your passwords will be able to withstand an offline attack long enough for you to discover the breach, removing the need to rotate passwords, and keep you safe against all but the strongest adversaries.

Note however, it doesn’t change my advice for creating passwords for sites you visit, since it’s safe to assume most sites still use relatively weak MD5-crypt or SHA-1 hashes.

LinkedIn and password security

What happened?

Per Thorshiem, a Norwegian security researcher, discovered a file containing 6.5 million SHA-1 unsalted password hashes posted to a Russian hacker site. The poster was requesting help cracking the passwords. Multiple researchers have confirmed that at least some of the passwords are from LinkedIn, by looking for known passwords (i.e. their own) that are only used for LinkedIn, and by examining some of the already-cracked passwords, many of which include the words “link” or “LinkedIn.” The file appears to only contain passwords, and no usernames, but it’s likely the hacker(s) that posted the file have usernames as well. 300,000 have already been cracked.

What does this mean?

Passwords are most often stored as a hash, which transforms the password into a fixed-length value. To check if someone enters the correct password, the system takes the password entered, hashes it, and compares it to the stored hash. If they match, the system allows the login to proceed. In some cases, a salt is added to the password before the hash is done, which makes cracking harder. The salt is a random value that’s stored with the password hash.

The transformation method, in this case SHA-1, encodes passwords is such a way that the only practical method to crack the password is to calculate the hash for a possible password, and compare the hash against the list of 6.5 million. Hackers and security professionals use two methods for cracking: a dictionary attack, which tries a list of words and common passwords, and a brute-force attack, which simply tries each possible password, (aaaaaaaa, then aaaaaaab, …).

Although this may sound difficult, modern software, combined with a fast video graphics card (to do the calculations), can test hundreds of millions of passwords per second against the entire list simultaneously… combine this with the knowledge that humans choose predictable passwords, and passwords can be guessed quite quickly. Already, 300K passwords (about 5%) are known to have already been cracked. Over time, the number of cracked passwords will steadily increase.

What should I do now?

If you use LinkedIn, change your password now. It’s not certain that your password has been or even will be cracked, but it’s a reasonable precaution. If your LinkedIn password is the same as the one you use on other sites, you’ll need to change those too. A common tactic today is to try an already-known password on other sites. See my suggestions below on how I manage my own passwords for how you can make this easier for you and harder for the bad guys.

How can I protect myself against this type of attack?

The standard advice from security professionals is to pick hard to guess “strong” passwords, and pick different passwords for each site you use. This quickly becomes an impossible task; I have well over 100 passwords to keep track of. Some time ago, I gave up on trying to remember passwords and adopted a password manager. A good password manager does the job of both generating unique, random passwords for each site you use, storing them securely, all protected by a single master password, and makes it easy to enter your password when logging on to a website (just click a button!)

Right now, I use 1Password, but also recommend LastPass. I use a very long pass phrase for my master password, which is a phrase or complete sentence that should be easy to remember, but hard to guess. Five or more words is good, and using spaces and punctuation is also good. 1Password has a post that discusses the topic in detail, and I like their example of “I have 35 bats: Larry, Moe & Curly.” LastPass can step up security by allowing you to add a USB device as an additional (second factor) authenticator. I currently don’t have my pass phrase written down, but if you’re forgetful, I’d recommend writing it down, sealing it in an envelope (or a tamper-evident bag if you can get one), and storing it in a safe place, like an actual safe, or your safety deposit box.

For individual websites, I generate a 15-character random password that contains upper case, lower case, and numbers, which is compatible with most sites, and long enough that it’s really unlikely it will ever be cracked using current technology. I don’t use the 1Password built-in generator, but for those who do (it’s easier), I’d recommend setting length to 15 or more, with 1 digit, and 1 symbol for sites that require it. Since 1Password has clients for all my devices, and syncs using Dropbox, I always have my passwords handy.

The net effect of all of this? It’s easier for me to use, since I only have to remember one password that I don’t need to change. It’s harder for the bad guys, since if they manage to steal a site’s password database, they probably won’t be able to crack my password, unless the site is not properly protecting passwords and storing them in plain text. Finally, if I do find out a site has been broken into, fixing the problem is easy: I generate a new password for that site.

For security professionals:

Security professionals I know routinely use the same approach (password managers). My challenge to the community is this: why not adopt this approach for ALL passwords, including the passwords we’re charged to protect? After all, LastPass offers an enterprise edition that solves many of the problems that make passwords insecure. I’d love to hear from you via Twitter (@transvasive) what you think of giving password managers to everyone in your organization: good idea? crazy? something you’ve already implemented? I hope to write more on this topic in the future, and will include what you have to say (with attribution).