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Comment by maaku | Hacker News Reader

They've had some pretty horrible mistakes with respect to security though (before Andreas' time though, so no reflection on him), and the basic model of a web wallet is inherently broken...

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20 rounds of PBKDF2, there's tears in my eyes.

what's so wrong with 20 rounds of pbkdf2? I don't know of any attacks that can defeat it in realistic time spans.

A KDF is meant to slow down dictionary attacks by introducing a lot of computation. Normal values might be in the hundreds of thousands, even millions to bring the computation time down to less than a few a second on extremely high powered GPUs. 20 rounds has so little impact it's astonishing they even bothered to load the KDF library. Attacking encrypted files like this would be very fast for a motivated person, and when we know there's magic internet money involved there's a lot of motivated people.

doing 20 rounds in a browser represents a non-trivial amount of work. that's much better than nothing, as it helps defeat existing rainbow tables. iirc, 1000 rounds will take a

however as you suggest, on the server side, I would expect them to use a much higher 10k or so round count.

May I ask, what are some examples of the security mistakes?

They left people's wallets with "aliases" open to be cracked by anybody who found them for years, messed up their RNG and revealed some users private keys, a few XSS mishaps, and their support reset 2FA keys for hackers with social engineering.

a.k.a. they made mistakes and then remedied the problem quickly without much controversy. Sounds like the opposite of another trading firm that just collapsed.

These sound like mistakes that many beginner companies can easily make when trying to craft them. Why is there a demand for perfection out of the gate? And why are offers to remedy the situation not given the same kudos?

> Why is there a demand for perfection out of the gate?

Because it only takes one flaw for money to be permanently lost.

Like with airliners and nuclear reactors, there is no room for mistakes because you get no second chances.

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