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Comment by laurent123456 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how they can be sure that a website stores their website in plain text? Just because a website sends an email confirmation with the password doesn't mean they store it in plain text. The developer could just send the email before hashing the password.

Not saying it's a good practice to send the password by email but it seems the website stretches the truth a bit.

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The majority of the items on the website are password reminder emails. This is after the initial sign up, which means the do indeed store it in plain text.

Either that, or they store it in encrypted format. Encryption typically implies that decryption is possible. Encrypted text is not plain text. These terms do have real meanings.

You mean to say "the sites do not store the text in non-reversible format."

Encrypted text is equivalent to plain text to anyone who has the ability to decrypt it.

What passwords need is a secure password hashing method. It's a very special purpose sort of thing, different from ordinary hashing, encrypting, and key derivation. It's unfortunate that it doesn't have a proper name.

Neither "PBKDF2", B-"crypt", nor S-"crypt" are helping much with this terminology.

>> "Encrypted text is equivalent to plain text to anyone who has the ability to decrypt it."

This is a vastly different claim than "these websites store passwords as plaintext." There are a lot of differences in assumptions and attack vectors, etc.

It usually pays for security alarms to be precise, and this site almost goes out of its way to be imprecise (and likely inaccurate). In this case, your verbiage would work great for the site in question. Why not say these are sites that don't use "secure password hashing methods" instead of making bogus unverifiable claims?

It doesn't matter how you spin the verbiage. It's all just as bad.

Being accurate is not spinning. Accuracy matters, especially in matters of security. It's really not too much to ask for security alarmists to make precise claims.

Would something like this satisfy you:

The system provides functionality for (password reset via email|sending plaintext password reminder emails|other password-based credential recovery|other delegation or retention of password-based credentials) which strongly suggests that an attacker who succeeded in (cross site scripting (XSS)|cross site request forgery (XSRF)|obtaining production server access|obtaining production database access|obtaining back-up meda|observeing network traffic|actively injecting network traffic) would then be subsequently capable of (logging into this site with a targeted user's password-based credentials|mounting on-line attacks against (a specific user's|all users') password-based credentials|mounting (dictionary|non-dictionary) off-line brute-force attacks against (a specific user's|all users') password-based credentials)|passive decryption attacks|active man-in-the-middile attacks) (with little or no work factor).

This (is|is not) recommended for (urgent) remediation. It (is likely|is not) sufficient to meet Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards or other adequate standards of care in the industry.

Check all that apply.

Also see http://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/719.html , for example http://capec.mitre.org/data/definitions/55.html .

Websites sending passwords in email should be alarming. You are trying to spin it as not necessarily alarming, which is false.

ciphertext + key = plaintext

I will agree with you, however, that this site is being a bit sloppy with its claims and I am going along with it because it suits my purposes (i.e., errs on the side of being conservative). But this is how security needs to work. Those claiming a system is secure should usually end up with a healthy burden of proof, whereas those claiming it's probably not should be listened to carefully.

By being vague about their claims, they are also being unclear on what should be done to fix the issue. Maybe in some cases, the offending websites even feel they don't need to do anything. I can already imagine some reactions:

- "I'm not storing the password in plain text, I'm hashing it after sending the email confirmation"

- "I'm not storing it in plain text, I'm encrypting it."

And of course, they would entirely miss the point that the real issue is that they are sending the password by email.

In other contexts of society it's perfectly reasonable (if not expected) to point out "offenders" (those who are increasing risk of harm to the public) without being obligated to at the same time to educate and reform the offender.

I gently agree. To be fair to the site, they do mention (admittedly on the bottom of the about page)

> More reading on why even _just sending the password_ via email without storing it in plain text is bad.

Which has a hyperlink to

(http://plaintextoffenders.com/post/7006690494/whats-so-wrong...)

> What's so wrong about sending a new password in plaintext? It doesn't mean that the password is saved in plaintext...

Ironically enough, I went to log in to HN specifically to upvote comments in this thread, forgot my password and had to use the 'email yourself a new password' function.

Granted, it sends a randomly generated password. And granted: it's probably meant for one-time use only (I presume). However, logging in with the new password does not automatically prompt (or even force) to change it to something of my own choosing. Result: hit 'remember password' in Chrome and forget about it. Now my active HN password is in my inbox, in plain text.

This is an objection without much substance. The main thing that you're worried about with a plain text password is that it will be obtained by a third party.

These are sites which are sending emails with passwords in the clear. They are also storing your password near the decryption key (if any), so a single security breach can compromise many passwords. That is to say: even if the rest of their infrastructure is NSA-level paranoid, whichever server(s) are sending out these password reminder emails are prime targets.

Please do not defend this behavior.

Please read my comments: I'm not defending the sending of plaintext passwords.

But please do not defend sloppy claims of security vulnerabilities.

Just to be sure, I had a look at the first 20 websites - 50% of them are password reminders, the rest are registration confirmation emails so it's not the majority of them.

In any case, sending a password by email is always bad, no doubt about it, but my point is that they claim these websites store passwords as plain text when, half of the time, they don't actually know. Although this is a useful website, they lose a bit in credibility by being more sensationalist than they need to be.

You're entirely correct; an outsider cannot determine whether a password is stored in encrypted format or not.

I agree that sending passwords by email is a bad idea, but I also believe that the folks behind this site should learn what it means to say "website storing a password in plain text" (from their about page). They're right, but for the wrong reasons.

If at some later time you can click a button that says "I forgot my password", and they email you the plain text password, then we know that they have stored the plain text password.

I'll play along. How do you know that they didn't store the password in an encrypted format using e.g. DSA? For argument's sake, let's say this happens:

1. You create your password ("ABCDEF").

2. Their system stores it to the database encrypted ("a;kdjfa;oisdurpoqiwur,m c3249um zxc,vmvsdflkgjad[fiualmdr23,4mo;icuzvlcm œ rtoqieuroier").

3. You click "I forgot my password".

4. Their system transforms the encrypted format to your original ("ABCDEF").

I think you mean to say "we know that they have not stored the password in a non-reversible format".

This is pedantic, but specifics matter when talking about security.

They may have indeed encrypted somthing with RSA-4096 or whatever. But that's irrelevant security theater once they decrypt it and send it to you in-the-clear over email. Not only is the email plain text on the wire, an unknown number of email servers will handle it along the way and many of them will log it.

It also means they have the decryption key available to online systems. It's almost certainly exposed to the very same vulnerabilities that the rest of the database has.

A cipher is simply a means of converting a plaintext secrecy problem into a key distribution problem.

And for the folks who didn't request their passwords via email, the passwords are stored encrypted on a disk, like their credit cards. That's not security theater. What you mean to say is that "this system has a downstream vulnerability for some use cases." That's a lot more accurate; why not say that instead of leaning on the trope of "security theater"? Obviously that vulnerability is pretty severe, but it still pays to describe it accurately.

The reason precision matters with security is because taking the "conservative" approach (also known as the "chicken little approach") ensures that normal people will tune out and ignore security altogether. When making security claims, it pays to take 10 seconds and write what you mean. It's not hard in cases like this.

I can (and will) speak and write for hours about authentication if you get me in the right mood. (Luckily I need to go to bed now :-)

But if you think that there's a 10 second formulation to the multitude of subtleties involved here, well frankly that's dangerously simplistic.

The 10-second formulation: "these sites will email your password, meaning it can be used to compromise your account."

That's precise, short, and easily understandable. It's also verifiable. I'm sure you can come up with something that hits those marks just as quickly. It's really not hard, which makes the sloppiness of this site's claims more annoying.

With your formulation, a site can get itself off of the offender list by not sending certain emails. Yet in most of the password data breaches we've seen in the last year, the email was not actually the method by which the stored credentials were leaked. A simple web search https://www.google.com/q=plain+text+password+breach shows that plaintext (or improper hashing) of database-stored credentials is probably a more common factor.

Your formulation is "precise, short, and easily understandable" but it's also wrong. You're making the mistake of measuring the thing that's easiest to measure rather that the thing that's most important to improve.

And for the folks who didn't request their passwords via email

By definition, we don't know who has requested that the password be sent via plain text email because that party has not successfully authenticated as a known user.

Seems to me your example is like a bank storing things in a secure locked vault, then leaving the key in the vault door at all times. It's technically accurate to say the valuables are stored in a locked vault - but the actual security level is no better than being stored in an unlocked vault.

In other words, what is technically correct doesn't convey an accurate impression.

If you're dealing with a bank that keeps their vault key in their vault door, or a member of the public choosing a bank, they might not have the nuanced understanding of security to understand the problem if you use too much technical jargon.

For the purpose of getting your password, reversible encryption means the same as plain-text.

Sending passwords in plain-text over email is bad enough in itself, and it also tells a lot about how they think about plain-text passwords in general.

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