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GRC's | Off The Grid

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23 pointsbillpg7 comments

I don't see how this is much more secure than a reusable one-time pad. Which is not so secure.

In fact I'm a little weary of GRC since almost all of his posts have so many extreme claims such as "This “Off The Grid” technology is the only known system to provide secure encryption using nothing but a specially designed piece of paper.", "create your own personal custom grid (which NO ONE ELSE will ever have)". All of this makes it look like a scam to me.

AFAICT, this can be defeated with a suffixed domain that invites users to register.

I.e., put a message board on a specialized domain (e.g. amazoncomplaints.com, somerandombank-watchdog.com) and then harvest the target passwords as users sign up...

Sudoku solvers might take interest in breaking this. Given enough known generated passwords, it should be possible to reconstruct the square, no?

In the Security Now podcast [1], Gibson asserted that every position in these 25x25 grids has so much entropy that even a hell of a lot of passwords wouldn't give away the whole grid.

Now, I personally couldn't pull this off, but I'd actually love to see the Math done here.

[1] Video: http://twit.tv/show/security-now/315 Transcript: http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-315.htm

The generator on this webpage is based on five samples from the Javascript PRNG (all from the same state, so effectively only 32 bits of entropy or so), plus the browser's window size and client viewport size, and mouse movements. Prior to sampling mouse movements, we're talking about around 64 bits of entropy here; probably less if your window is maximized (since there are a small number of popular window sizes). I wouldn't trust the grid that's shown on initial load, that's for sure.

Also note that it's frequently said that anyone can make a cryptosystem secure enough that the creator themselves cannot break it. So I wouldn't fully trust this without further analysis. I don't really like how much key material is exposed to the sites, though...

But that's not really the point. The real problem is that this is a _lot of work_. The real problem with passwords is not that generating them is hard. There's no end to systems to generate passwords. Here's an easy one: Print out a list of 6^4 common English words. Roll 4 dice to select one. Repeat four times. There's your password.

No, the real problem is compliance. Remembering passwords is hard, so people don't bother. Regenerating passwords each time with this "Off The Grid" system is also hard. So people won't bother. It is _far better_ to have a password management app than to halfheartedly use a system like this but eventually give up and go back to using the same password everywhere.

Ah, thanks for the analysis.

You're absolutely right about its use for password generation & management. I suppose the scheme might still have other uses where the proverbial "off the grid" aspect indeed strengthens security? Are those relevant at all?

I still believe my system is better. Detailed description and source here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2431480

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