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Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Father of Unix Ken Thompson checkmated as his old password has finally been cracked
Back in 2014, developer Leah Neukirchen found an /etc/passwd file among a file dump from the BSD 3 source tree that included the passwords used by various computer science pioneers, including Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Steve Bourne, and Bill Joy.
As she explained in a blog post on Wednesday, she decided at the time to try cracking the password hashes, created using DES-based crypt(3), using various cracking tools like John the Ripper and hashcat.
When the subject surfaced on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list last week, Neukirchen responded with 20 cracked passwords from the file that's she'd broken five years ago. Five hashed passwords, however, remained elusive, including Thompson's.
ZghOT0eRm4U9s
"Even an exhaustive search over all lower-case letters and digits took several days (back in 2014) and yielded no result," wrote Neukirchen, who wondered whether Thompson might somehow have used uppercase or special characters.
The mailing list participants, intrigued by the challenge, set to work on the holdouts. The breakthrough came on Wednesday, from Nigel Williams, a HPC systems administrator based in Hobart, Tasmania.
"Ken is done," he wrote in a post to the mailing list. The cracking effort took more than four days on an AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 running hashcat at a rate of about 930MH/s.
ZghOT0eRm4U9s is a hash of p/q2-q4!
It's a common chess opening in descriptive notation. As Neukirchen observed, Thompson contributed to the development of computer chess.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 10 2019, @02:08PM (9 children)
Those randomish passwords are intended for use with a password manager. That way you just have to remember one password.
I think the term "password" should be phased out in preference for "passphrase" to encourage longer strings.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by nitehawk214 on Thursday October 10 2019, @02:55PM (1 child)
But it is completely stupid to have a site give you a password for use in a password manager. The manager itself should generate the password in a way that there is no possibility of it being logged somewhere.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Thursday October 10 2019, @03:22PM
Or use an offline password manager. I use a closed-source, proprietary password manager with significant vulnerability to "brute force" attacks. It's called my brain.
Lack of password reuse (and lack of *userid* reuse) enhances security further.
And while $5 wrenches are still effective, they are even more effective against a software based password manager. Since giving up the master password for a software password gives an attacker *all* your passwords at once.
Swinging that wrench is hard work!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday October 10 2019, @03:21PM (6 children)
Genuine question, I don't use a password manager: How do you back up the contents of your password manager in case it gets corrupted? And what protects that backup? At the end of the day it seems to me that the backup is only as secure as the password you apply to it, and that can't be done with the password manager.
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Thursday October 10 2019, @06:07PM
I use PasswordSafe. My personal password database resides generally in 2 places (cell phone, home PC) in mostly-current form (and a few other places generally up to a few revisions old), and I merge the changes together every few weeks which produces a backup file which I believe is kept for the last 3 major revisions. So if the latest one is corrupted for some reason, I can usually reproduce it without too much hassle. The backup is just an exact copy, with the same master password as the original. You can easily set a new master password, but I don't use the same password or anything like it for anything else, so I don't see it being lost or stolen. I could probably change it every merge cycle if I was concerned about that, it's easy enough to do. Just keep your last 3 passwords, in the password manager....
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 10 2019, @06:32PM
The same way you backup your photo album, or your word processor documents, or whatever else you have. By setting up a backup system that creates a second (and/or third, forth, etc.) copy of everything onto another device with some form of retention plan so you can pull a copy of a file as it existed two days ago, or one week ago, or two months ago, etc.
Then, if corruption happens, you just step back in time through your backup archive until you find the last non-corrupted version, and replace the corrupted copy with that copy.
Any good backup plan will contain some form of encrypted storage for the backup data. So that is what protects that backup. But remember, the password manager will be an encrypted file to begin with, so even if the backup system merely copied without encrypting, the password manager storage file would already be protected by its own encryption layer.
Actually, the passwords to the backups can be held in the password manager. You just have to:
Then, when you need to access the password for the backups, you need at least one of your plural devices to be operational and capable of opening the manager save file (which will almost always be the case).
Now, if you mean for the situation of where you have only one computing device, well, then, yes, you do get a chicken and egg situation. The solution then is to keep the password in the manager (for use when the one device is operational) and keep a paper backup of that same password in a secure locked location (for use when the one device is no longer operational).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 10 2019, @09:11PM (3 children)
I use KeePass, and I simply have the password store on multiple devices (all mine) and an offline backup, and there's a copy in my off-site backup. rsync and cron take care of keeping everything except the offline one up to date.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 10 2019, @09:31PM
KeepAss
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday October 11 2019, @07:11AM (1 child)
I'm pleased that you are happy with KeePass.
However, from what I read here, most people use a second device to back up their password data. For many people that simply is not possible. It is easy to imagine that everyone now uses a mobile/cell phone - this is simply not the case. In some places of work, your mobile devices are not permitted inside the workplace and thus are useless as a second device for backing up your passwords at work. Additionally, having to back up to a second on-line device simply provides a second attack surface for anyone trying to collect your passwords. Yep, we believe that they are secure - until the news comes out sometime in the future that they're not.
Finally, if I have understood correctly, whatever piece of software you use to remember your passwords, it is only protected by a single password which, in turn, gives access to the program providing access to all of the others. So, ultimately, it is only as secure as that single password.
I have a system - which I will not detail here for obvious reasons - whereby I can recall in most cases, or at least deduce, the password which tends to be between 20-24 characters in length and uses both cases and symbols, and is linked to the site I am trying to access. I will confess that I have only started using this system in the last 3-4 years and I have, therefore, some passwords which do not follow the rules I have created and which are probably considerably weaker, but none of them give access to anything that would cause me a problem if they were compromised.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Friday October 11 2019, @10:57AM
It's called pick your poison and risk management.
Yes, it's a risk to use a password manager like KeePass (which I use in Windows; I use the variant KeepassXC in Linux). However, the passwords inside are encrypted and it forgets your copied password after specified amount of time, defaulted to 10 or 12 seconds. (I set it for 30 seconds after installation.)
Your method is also risky. You're basing your passwords on a formula that is difficult to change. Once one of your passwords is compromised, it weakens all of your others. Not to mention, it's nice to write encrypted notes and keep URLs associated with logins and passwords. And there are keyboard shortcuts for almost everything.
Finally, as far as backing up passwords: copying the KeePass file is like copying any other file, so it's ultra easy to backup. If you can't backup data in your work environment, then that itself is a problem too, but that problem has nothing to do with passwords or password managers.