The Secret Life of Passwords
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Password reuse is much worse that having a weak password. Hackers only brute force high value targets, everyone else should just aim to have unique passwords for every service they use.
However, the average person can only remember 5-10 unique passwords and they have many many accounts...password reuse. For the average person password managers aren't an option for normal people, so we have a big problem.
Why not?
Every major browser in its default configuration offers to remember your passwords, and some will even offer to sync them across all your devices.
The only thing that's missing is an offer to generate random passwords automatically, for which you currently need an add-on/extension. But even without that ability, the browser is already a pretty decent password manager.
On plenty of sites, Chrome/FF/IE/etc. will fail to recognize a user or password field. They'll often fail to recognize them at account creation. Sometimes you'll need multiple accounts on a single domain, which Chrome can't handle (for example). I could go on and on...
Browsers remember passwords as a mere convenience, when it happens to work. They are in no way "proper" password managers, which are encrypted with a master password, can be exported and backed up, handle multiple accounts, etc...
But since some of the best password managers are already open source, I wonder what's preventing browser vendors from integrating at least some of the functionality. A good password manager not only helps contain the damage of leaked passwords, but also does a very good job at protecting users from phishing attacks at similar-looking domains.
All the browsers have been pretty stagnant on this front for the last few years. I suspect they've been hoping that everyone will move to an SSO platform in which the browser vendors themselves have a vested interest (Mozilla Persona, Google account, Microsoft account).
Deleted comment
1. Memorize a single prefix that has at least an uppercase letter, a number, and a symbol, to be used with all passwords. (e.g. j8$F)
2. Use a physical journal or pad of paper to note down each site's password restrictions (e.g. "no symbols") and a personal hint to the rest of the password.
3. Your password is the prefix (minus any unsupported characters) plus the answer to the hint.
So the hint "No symbols, They All Float Down Here" might become j8fPennyWise. "Feet On The Road" might be j8$fFlintstones.
___
This minimizes what people have to memorize, is secure against casual attacks by people in the same physical area, is strong against attackers who might try to replace "password4hn" with "password4reddit", and doesn't require any sort of special software.
Not seriously, but I'm just saying. If you are really concerned about security I have a hard time understanding this concept.
A paper pad, on the other hand, is extremely secure against cyberattack, and she has tons of experience with managing it and creating backups. And it's almost what she was gonna do anyway.
> Paper pads are extremely secure (sic).
Stop right there, asshole. You're doctoring quotes and changing their meaning. That's not the correct usage of (sic) either.
> I forgot that users no longer have to key in passwords
1. Not all passwords are commonly-entered.
2. Passwords collected together in a defined file format are a richer target than ad-hoc collection thank forms-with-password-fields used in one of multiple possible browsers.
It's good advice, but it's by no means simpler than the alternative.
Do you actually have a less complex way to reliably identify a person at the other end of a computer network?
(physical keys using NFC stuff are pretty exciting, but the tech isn't in place yet... until then we're stuck with "something you know" and the limits of human memory vs computer power)
At first I thought you were going to advocate the "just pick a prefix and then append the name of the site after it", like Go123facebook and Go123gmail. Which is, of course, quite awful because one plaintext reversing of one password may very well defeat all of the other passwords.
Hmmm... also, there's a failure-mode with systems that notice the prefix and reject future passwords as "too similar to one you used before". Users would have to deviate from the strategy somehow.
Am I missing something? I'm surprised to be the first to point out that this is very dangerous advice (to the extent bad passwords are dangerous).
All it does is add one, easily guessable bit of information -- for the first password the attacker seeks. And after someone has the first password, this method adds zero security; the attacker then has the passwords for every other website.
Another annoying but logical constraint is the one where sites query your pwd for references to the site itself and tell you not to include that - another strike against that appending approach.
The requirements vary, are conflicting and change over time. I tried your approach, but then gave up after repeatedly forgetting what restrictions applied for which site - altering my specific password and making it non-memorable. Enter 1Password.
There is something to be said for the philosophy of, "I don't have to run faster than the bear, I just have to run faster than you." But in this particular case, at least, it's not hard to do better than that.
For example, if you take a fixed secret string, append the site name, SHA256 the whole mess, and then derive a password from the hash, that's reasonably secure and only requires you to memorize one secret. The downside is that you need to perform SHA256 whenever you want the password for a particular site.
But if you take a fixed password and merely concatenate something derived from the site name to get the site-specific password, that's not secure. You're counting on the attacker not figuring out your "something derived from" and that's security by obscurity. (Unless your algorithm involves mixing in some hard-to-guess secret, but then you're back at my suggestion above with a bit of extra stuff tacked on.)
This baffles my mind. Is this common practice in finance? What would stop a malicious actor from impersonating someone whose password they knew? Even if these passwords aren't tied to someone's identity in any way, they presumably exist to secure sensitive data and/or systems, but then they're shared with officemates like Dilbert comics?
Aren't there regulations for security of financial information? It's hard to believe this passes muster. If it's a 'reasonable precautions' regulation, this fails badly.
I wrote a basic command line only one[1] a few years ago, but command line UI doesn't really make for "usable by everyone". It would be nice if there were something like this that had a good UI.
[1]: example: https://code.google.com/p/cryptsetup/. I believe that the way it works is it encrypts the actual decryption key for data with keys derived from passphrases multiple times, so any one of the those passphrases can decrypt the key, which then can access the data.
I dearly hope that those people who actually told passwords to the author were either no longer using them or immediately changed them to something better on reflection of just how terrible they were. My mother kept a door from her parents' first house (which they built after emigrating after WW2) for sentimental reasons, that doesn't mean she relied on the old antique lock to secure her current house.
And if you see how Cantor Fitzgerald treated its employees and their families in the wake of that crisis, you'd see that helping them was the right thing.
The banking industry may have metastasized from a service industry to a giant vampire squid, but that doesn't mean every company turned into slimy blood-sucking leeches.
(And maybe C-F were heartless leeches before the attack and reformed due to their literal near-death experience -- I really paid little attention to them until that day. But they are famous for how they responded and rebuilt the business).
Money, finance, jobs, passwords, it all seems so pointless when I think of it against that loss.
What made the story famous was the fact that the company went out of its way to support the families of its dead staff even when the company itself was in the middle of an existential crisis. And it has continued to be somewhat of a "good guy" (as much as you can say that about someone in that business). I am sure there's a lot of PR spin, of course, but I watched this happen in the news when they appeared to be struggling pretty hard and were not managing their PR at all. They tried cutting off the survivors but got hammered (and probably needed that password help!). Most companies just let their insurance deal with the dead employees' families.
(Hmm, by doing a quick search of "cantor fitzgerald 9/11" I see that they were indeed utter assholes before the event.)
Of course they've had a chance to burnish their image since then.
It may have turned out well here, but you really don't want to tie together things like "the company survives" and "grieving widows continue to eat". And not just because it may involve things like calling up relatives of the deceased to ply them for passwords while the bodies are still warm.
They also provided health care to the families for 10 years. Again, if they went out of business, none of that would have been there.
Losing someone who is earning a salary often drives families into a downward spiral. Having to sell your house and move because you suddenly are choosing between mortgage payments and food for your kids is not easy. The survival of the company prevented this from being a sudden financial adjustment for many of these families.
Something they couldn't access then. Are they talking about passwords for 3rd party services? Or perhaps passwords for encrypted hard drives?
Passwords to business-critical systems should be stored in a safe, in an off-site location (preferably multiple offsite locations).
Taking this to another extreme, does a DR plan need to account for the earth no longer being viable? Do you need system/data backups in space?
[Cough]. Even in America? More like especially nowadays, no?
Beautifully written piece, otherwise.
Massive declines.
Does anyone feel like sharing?
Ahh, the memories.