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At What Point Does Storing Passwords in Plaintext Become Criminally Negligent

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday April 08 2018, @02:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the easier-to-check-that-way dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2018/04/another-day-another-breach-at-what-point-does-storing-passwords-in-plaintext-become-criminally-negligent/

The third largest breach ever just happened in Finland. Passwords were stored in plaintext. At T-Mobile Austria, they explain that of course they store the password in plaintext, but they have so good security so it's nothing to worry about. At what point does this become criminally negligent?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 08 2018, @04:53PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 08 2018, @04:53PM (#663988)

    At a top 5 CS university, passwords were until recently stored plaintext, supposedly because of interoperability reasons with legacy green screen services.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 08 2018, @05:20PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 08 2018, @05:20PM (#663998)

    here in a top 5 canadian U, they are AES encrypted for interoperablity but the password to the master key in plain text, however you need to have the code to uncypher them cause we do proper keys derivation. the master key is never directly use to encrypt or decrypt, to do so you need a cipher key derived by hashing the master key concatenated to it's usage context. You cannot get around the fact that somewhere you have to have a key or a password stored in plaintext somewhere unless your willing to pay an operator who know the password/key to be present if a service needing cyphers is restarted

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 08 2018, @07:12PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 08 2018, @07:12PM (#664030)

      I feel a public key crypto solution could be created without having the users password needing to be stored, and the legacy app getting a completely random password based on its requirements.

    • (Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Monday April 09 2018, @09:59AM

      by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Monday April 09 2018, @09:59AM (#664327)

      You cannot get around the fact that somewhere you have to have a key or a password stored in plaintext somewhere

      Don't worry, that is on the sticky note on the monitor.

  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday April 08 2018, @10:39PM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Sunday April 08 2018, @10:39PM (#664075) Homepage

    I'm not surprised, Computer Science is almost entirely unrelated to Computer Engineering (Software or Hardware) or Information Technology.

    It's like expecting a Math department to know whether their building conforms to civil engineering standards, and to be able to rectify any problems that exist.

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