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Comment by iinnPP | Hacker News Reader

This is a misunderstanding. The CS agent has access to a plaintext (security question) password that can be used under special circumstances. It must be readable to function.

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My solution to security/recovery questions is to generate or make up ransom answers, and store the question/answer pair in the notes field of the entry in my password manager.

This kills the “knowing things about you” vector of phishing and impersonation and make it as secure as any unique and random password.

How can you be sure that a targeted attack can't exfiltrate all available fields?

For the record, I don't have a great answer to this either -- genuinely curious.

You can't. I see that as a far lesser/more manageable risk than traditional security questions are though.

Absolutely. Like how many times has my mother's maiden name and the name of my first pet been leaked.

I hate the ones that don’t have a single objective answer. Like “name of your best friend in 3rd grade” or “city where you first fell in love”.

Those are the best! You're supposed to use a random answer like "cookie monster" or "flatulence"

Or weirdly ethnocentric questions like “what’s your favorite food” with multiple choice answers like “spaghetti, pizza, hamburger”. Good thing everyone who recovers their password is American!

Or “what instrument do you play”, when multiple instruments I play are in the multiple choice list but only one can be correct. And what the fuck is the point of multiple choice security questions when anyone has a 1/10 chance of correctly guessing on any login attempt.

United Airlines is by far the worst major company I have ever seen in all of these and deserves to be shamed.

"What's your mother's maiden name?"

"42_red_banana_&"

This is why I choose random but plausible answers.

"Mother's maiden name? Cruz-Valdez"

"First Concert? Lil' Mermaid"

"City you were born in? Ubuntu"

The way I usually do this is with the random article button on Wikipedia, until I find something that sounds plausible.

1password team, integrate this feature please

Ditto. Have you ever had to use one? It's always a laugh.

CSR: What's your mother's maiden name? Oh wait, looks like an issue on our side.

Me: No issue. My mother's maiden name is Q5D6Erty#76cjWE1H. She's Dutch.

I did do this once, but it didn't really inspire confidence in the security of the whole thing.

Me: "ok, but it's some random text: Q 5 --"

CSR: "--yeah, ok, that's fine"

Since then I just make up a random, fake but real-sounding answer so the humans don't get confused.

I didn't realize I would have to say the answers over the phone when choosing the answers (and thought it would only ever be me filling them in online)

CSR: "What is your mother's maiden name?"

Me: "do you really want me to say it?"

CSR: chuckling. "Yes, I need you to say it"

Me: "Diarrhea"

The trick is to enjoy confusing humans and share the story of why when you get there. I went to the mall for the first time in a long time, every place wants to sign you up on the mailing list for a small discount. So they can email me at <Name of store>@mydomain this way I unsubscribe and if I see email coming to that address I know which store is the rat. They look confused, ask for 'a real address' well that is a real address I say, and here's why: ...

I get a little thrill every time.

If you're storing it next to the password, then you've killed the point of the recovery questions anyway. May as well not store them at all.

If that's an option it's usually what I do but often they're mandatory.

That assumes that there's no other way to get your password than by accessing the contents of your password manager. The service itself could have its passwords/hashes leaked, and people unfortunately do reuse passwords across services even with a password manager, so it's very plausible for someone to get your password but not the answers to your questions.

This is also similar to my solution, however not so relevant here.

The "password" here is only used over the phone in place of an account number or similar where a customer can't recall other information.

The reddit user here would have had to provide this password over the phone before to another agent. It's the only way for it to get there.

This is the login password. It was an unintelligable text with non alphabet characters.

Source: I posted that on reddit.

The easiest solution is to call them and ask why they have that password and why they can read it. They will verify everything I have already said.

Nice try, Toronto Hydro

I made no such claim. I merely have knowledge of the exact system in question.

Could it have changed since you last saw the system? Because the OP disagrees with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631791

No, the system was updated in August of this year.

I don't see why the security question answer has to be stored in the clear. If you have to give it over the phone, the agent can type it into a form field that hashes it and compares, just like a password on the site.

What city were you born in: “Millwaukee”. The agent would be able to tell it was Milwaukee, but if he or she typed “Milwaukee” it’d go “bzzzzt” just because the user typoed the input initially at set-up.

It's still awful security. city of birth is public info

It’s just an example to illustrate a point. Coulda been “Starbux lovers” instead of “starstruck lovers”.

Because security question answer have high variability for the average user. They're asked say, what street they grew up on. Is it "S. Main St." "South Main", "south main", "south main street", etc...

Security questions in general are terrible so don't take this as if it's in defense of them.

My favorite are the presumptive ones that assume something like "Where did you meet your spouse?"

Someone should just go over the top: "Who was the editor of your first successful novel?" "What investment did you make your first billion with?"

My bank's list of security questions are almost all about your children or your spouse.

Other than two about your birth location and mother's maiden name, both easily found answers for someone

There's viral social media posts that do security answer farming with prompts like

"Your superhero name is the name of your pet + favorite teachers name"

You'd click on the comments and there's tens of thousands of people volunteering answers. Some are of part of the hustle to till the honeypot, but I'd see people I know comment on them with real information. It's wild

For some of us, finding our mother's maiden name is as simple as looking at our name, either because it is a hyphenated name or because there was a time when the government refused to acknowledge the existence of the father in certain cases.

It is very hard to come up with universally good security questions.

It should be web of trust.

You add let's say, up to 3 peoples names and mobile numbers for recovery and then they are contacted requesting to reach out to you to authenticate.

Something like

"You've been added to X's web of trust for account recovery at example.com. If X needs to recover their account, we may ask you to confirm with them that it's genuine."

Then something like

"X is trying to recover their account for example.com. Please contact them within the next Y days to confirm it's genuine and if it is, respond with the the 4 digit recovery code X gives you"

Then from x's side:

"Your web of trust has been contacted. Feel free to contact them now and give them the pin YYYY so they can confirm this is genuine"

This approach pretty elegantly addresses a number of security question limitations and existing 2FA infrastructures shouldn't be that hard to modify in order to implement it.

Probably my favorite feature of this approach is it requires the various security code social manipulation scams to be successful against 2 people instead of 1 which is rather statistically unfavorable for the scammer.

A lot of people don’t want their trusted web to know what websites they are looking at? Think Grinder/other dating sites, financial/crypto, pornhub, certain message boards etc.

Well don't use it for porno sites then or just give different personal email addresses for your web.

Also there's a 100+ year old workaround for that which used to be used in the postal service so people didn't have boxes on their doorstep with giant labels on it reading things like "Dildos Direct": Either leave the company name off or use some alias.

Including the company name is really just a user interface flourish to dealienate the feature

It's a security question to access information on the account over the phone. It's not used in the web based system, which is completely detached from the phone system.

There's several alternatives to such an insecure system. That simply isn't the right way to do it.

Source?

Worked on the recent upgrade done in August.

Which really should not be the same!

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