Comment by jonny_noog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonny_noog | Hacker News Reader

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I did a bit of looking into bcrypt-ruby after hearing about it here. It sounds good, I like the idea of the "cost" attribute.

However, I note that Coda Hale appears to have no interest in supporting his bcrypt-ruby gem for Windows. On his blog he says essentially that he doesn't use Windows and hence has no motivation to put any time into getting a pre-compiled bcrypt-ruby to work on Windows.

I can totally understand where he's coming from and as I do all my dev work on Debian Linux, it's not a problem for me personally. But my partner is a Windows user and it would be a problem for him.

The closest I have found to instructions on getting bcrypt-ruby compiled on Windows are from the bcrypt-ruby README:

You‘ll need a working compiler. (Win32 folks should use Cygwin or um, something else.)

So does this mean that my partner would then have to use the Cygwin environment for all his dev work from this point on?

And a random comment from Coda Hale's blog:

bcrypt seems to work with the Windows One-Click-Installer too. It was easy to compile it with MinGW (I just had to define the missing types u_int8_t, u_int16_t, and u_int32_t). All your tests pass. So you might consider to offer a precompiled version for us Windows users.

I am not a C programmer (getting more experience with a compiled language is on my todo list, just no time as yet) nor am I a security expert. My past experience with compiling stuff basically extends to typing "make" and "make install". I don't really understand what "I just had to define the missing types u_int8_t, u_int16_t, and u_int32_t" means.

So as much as I would like to try and incorporate bcrypt-ruby into my current Rails project, I can't really justify this added overhead of getting it to work on my partners Windows dev box with near zero support.

If anyone has more info, that would be great. But otherwise, I will - for now - be sticking with salted SHA256.

I am the creator of this plugin.

Who cares about the name. I wanted something unique that would get people's attention and return unique content when searching. I also thought it was funny. People need to lighten up a little bit if the name bothers them. It's not like I put the name "authgasm" in helpers that you have to use all over your application. It sits in your plugin dir, that's all.

Anyways, regarding encryption. You can encrypt the password any way you want. Use bcrypt-ruby if you want. It would take no time at all to set up. Checkout the acts_as_authentic documentation. You can provide your own "crypto provider" and have it do whatever you want.

Lastly, I don't use Sha256 straight up. I add in salt. So reverse lookups are out of the question. Your last option is brute force. There is no encryption / hashing algorithm that is safe from brute force. Granted some might slow it down more than others, all that is doing is setting up more hurdles to jump, not 100% secure.

But I really like bcrypt, I'll look into it and maybe switch it to the default crypto provider. But, I really think for anything that is not being used in the NSA, Sha256 + salt would work just fine.

I agree on all points. I like the name of your plugin(s).

The main issue I have with bcrypt-ruby as I said is that there is basically no Windows support for it that I can find. I know that most of us who develop with Ruby/Rails use a Mac or Linux/Unix but there are some, like my business partner, who still use Windows as their development environment. For a Rails plugin or Ruby gem, I think it would be really nice if at least some effort was made to keep it more easily cross-platform compatible for those of us who are not C coders.

But, I really think for anything that is not being used in the NSA, Sha256 + salt would work just fine.

As I said, I'm no security expert, but the reading I have done would lead me to agree with you. It's all about degrees of security with the trade-off always being more security means less convenience for someone, be it the developer or the end user. I've weighed the security/convenience issue for me at this point in time, and I'm sticking with salted SHA256.

The trade-off is indeed the security of your users versus the convenience of your developers.

That said, I don't so much care whether you store your passwords with a demonstrably inferior scheme like Authgasm's default or the 1-line-delta variant of it that resolves its biggest problem. It's fine to be ignorant about this stuff; it's not going to make you 1 extra dollar to do it right.

Just don't be militant about your ignorance.

Just for the record, I'm not using Authgasm, not because I have any problem with it, I just chose to write the login stuff for my current project myself for various reasons I won't go into and had done so long before I came across this post.

I don't think I'm being militant about anything... Just carrying on what was a reasonably pleasant and honest conversation. Yes, part of my decision was to do with that my partner is a Window's user and I can't do anything about this at the moment. But the other part of the calculation that you overlook is that my current project is not one that requires over the top, secret squirrel encryption on stored passwords. This consideration came into it as well.

You sound bitter, man. Maybe you should take a nap and stop being so militant yourself.

Why do you think your application doesn't require "over the top" encryption on stored passwords? Who are your users?

So what, I'm meant to reply with something like "Um, my users are people..." and then you say something like "Well people pick shit passwords..." and so on.

Did the SHA eat your babies or something? :P

Seriously though, probably "over the top" was not a good choice of term. In a perfect world, I agree with the unspoken point you're trying to lead me into, which seems to be that all applications should never compromise on their security regardless of convenience or who their users are etc. But surely you must agree that in the real world this isn't always viable. I don't have unlimited time at my disposal.

If my current situation allowed it, I would use bcrypt based solely on the fact that OpenBSD recommend it.

However, my current situation does not allow this. Therefore, I have made a pragmatic decision that will enable me to continue moving towards my goal. I'm not going to apologize to you or anyone else for this.

I appreciate that you are passionate about what I assume is your chosen field of expertise, but perhaps in the future you could try talking to people more so than down to them. You might just find it yields friendlier results.

No, you've totally missed my point. I wanted to know, do you not have real users? Can arbitrary people not sign up for your application? Does it have a closed user base? Is it an enterprise product? Because, then, maybe password storage isn't an issue for you.

Otherwise, your users aren't simply giving you "shit passwords". They're giving you their bank password. Normal people do not make up 16 different passwords for all their web applications. If you take passwords from normal people on the Internet, and you ever get popular, you will come into possession of a large database of Bank of America credentials.

So yes, maybe you ought to consider being careful with them.

Doesn't using the same password everywhere (particularly if it's also your online banking password) qualify it as a "shit password" as I so eloquently put it? :)

In any case, I accept that there should be some degree of responsibility taken by the developer to try and protect their users information, lest we get the whole Reddit situation.

But as someone once said, you can't make the Internet idiot proof.

Perhaps that doesn't make it a "shit password", but it certainly is a "shit password policy".

Regardless, you can't realistically force your users to not have a "shit password policy". What you can do, however, is make sure that your app is probably not the point of failure for their password.

You can't make the internet idiot-proof, but you can make your apps reasonably malicious-person proof, and it's viewed by some (me) to be close to a moral responsibility of yours to do so - you either already know about, or are probably easily able to learn about "good" security policy, and ways to store users passwords and do validation while minimizing the risk of a malicious person acquiring your users passwords.

That is not to say that writing your own authentication / password storage scheme is something that you just shouldn't ever do - it can certainly be educational and entertaining - but 9 times out of 10 what you write probably shouldn't be used in production.

Hmm, so now we're moving onto 90% of the time you shouldn't use your own authentication / password storage scheme in production? So now it's not just the encryption algorithm, it's the whole login/permissions system that I should rip out? I'm not even going to touch that one, sorry.

This whole conversation is based on the above users belief that unless you are using bcrypt to encrypt the passwords in your database, you are doing a moral disservice to your users. I and at least one other guy have chosen for varying reasons to use salted SHA256.

If anyone can prove to me that salted SHA256 is easily crackable, not by NSA super computers, but by some guy who just might want to steal the database of my little application and crack my users passwords, then I will strongly reconsider my choice. This is not a dick size competition, I'm not a security expert, I'm not challenging anyone to prove me wrong, because I don't think I have the first hand knowledge to know if I'm right or not. But all the material I have found so far tells me that salted SHA256 is still viable encryption for my purposes.

If it's not, then I am genuinely interested to see the conclusive proof.

I wasn't necessarily saying you should rip anything out of your system. I haven't examined it, nor am I an expert on security (encryption, particularly is a rather complicated area filled with implementations with very subtle flaws, possibly undiscovered).

I wasn't trying to come of as critical of you, although I can see how my post could be read that way - I was just making the point that homegrown stuff in this area has a notorious reputation for being unreliable.

I would argue that if using bcrypt makes your passwords harder to crack than using SHA256, there isn't much of a reason to keep using SHA256 - salted or not - regardless of how hard SHA256 is to crack.

And yes, 90% of the time, authentication / password storage schemes exist for whatever framework or platform that you're using that have been thoroughly tested by people who probably know their stuff better than you or I - and, from a security standpoint, it's probably better to use their scheme as opposed to writing one yourself.

I can see where you're coming from. And trust me, I'm keenly aware that there are many people who have a better understanding of this and other issues than I do. This is the main reason why I'm using a framework to begin with.

However, as far as I can tell, none of the ready made authentication/password storage schemes for Rails use bcrypt in a cross-platform way, if they did I'd switch over. Where does that leave us? You can take that as a rhetorical question if you like.

That is a tough spot. I don't use RoR, so I can't offer much advice other than opening a ticket on your preferred methods bug tracker, or creating a patch - assuming they're open source and you're willing / able to do so.

"Salt" does nothing to address the primary way passwords have been cracked for the past 20 years, which is with incremental password crackers like Crack, L0phtcrack, and John the Ripper. Your comment about "anything not being used by the NSA" is silly, and misses the point entirely. Most Rails app users will entrust those apps with horribly bad passwords; bcrypt protects those passwords, and "salted SHA256" doesn't.

If you don't understand the problem you're trying to solve with this plugin, why are you promoting it?

My comment about "anything not being used by the NSA" is not silly, it's true. Hell the NSA developed the Sha functions. I am not one to take security lightly, and salted Sha256 is not taking security lightly. I am not sure what kind of apps you write, but for 99% of the apps in the world, salted Sha256 is plenty secure. If it was as big of a problem as you said it would be highly discouraged, which it is not. The leading authentication solution in rails uses Sha1. Regardless, if you are extra paranoid, you can use any type of encryption you want with authgasm. So the argument is moot. Lastly, authgasm is not about promoting sha256, its about a style of authentication in rails. The method of encryption is just an option, which is what the crypto_provider option is all about. If you don't understand the subject which you are discussing, why are you discussing it?

I actually looked into bycrypt and it's great. But it would be silly of me to use a linux only encryption solution in a library available to the ruby public.

It really doesn't sound like you've read any of the other comments in this thread.

No, no, no - just because the NSA developed it does not mean it is the right solution for this problem. Read the comment above explaining fast versus slow hashing.

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