Lest this blog turn into nothing more than a source of announcements, I figured I’d post something that has been eating me up for ages. Anyone who knows me knows that I hate passwords with a passion. They’re easy to break, easy to social engineer, and provide a false sense of security. People trade them for candy bars, reuse them, and don’t pick ones that are hard to guess. As soon as they become hard to guess, they also become hard to remember, leading to lots of helpdesk calls for password resets. All of these (and other) issues stem from one single root cause – passwords move the security role from the IT security department to the end users. We IT security people are constantly trying to make new rules for the end users to make sure they protect their passwords, but the problem is that while all these rules make sense to us, the end users are not IT security experts. They don’t have the background, experience, knowhow, etc. Expecting the end users to manage security of a system they don’t even understand is a huge mistake. And yet, for some reason, that’s what we do when we use passwords as the single factor needed to access sensitive data.

Another random Windows 7 fact I learned today – if you disable the Windows 7 firewall, it will also disable IPV6 and Service Hardening. Microsoft’s logic appears to be simply that if a system doesn’t have the Windows firewall enabled, then it should be treated as an insecure machine and not trusted to connect with an IPV6 IPSec tunnel. The obvious flaw in this logic is that many enterprises use other firewalls, which Windows will not account for. Those people will then have ot enable the Microsoft firewall and just put it into a completely accepting state if they want to use IPV6.

I was clearing out my bookmark file on an old machine this morning and stumbled across something I’d bookmarked and completely forgotten about – the best default password list I think I’ve ever seen. Also, it’s actually maintained! I just figured I’d share it.

Secure wireless

Originally uploaded by bachrach44

I noticed this on the wall at a recent ISSA meeting. In addition to the obvious security issue I’m trying to bring attention to, there is a bonus security issue being illustrated here – you can see my reflection!

I’ve been using Windows 7 fairly regularly on one of my machines for the past month or so. One thing I noticed is that the default password settings for Windows 7 include the fact that password expire after 42 days. Since most home users will never change their default settings, this setting will likely become a de-facto standard. However, the default settings also have a password history of zero (no remembered passwords), and a minimum age of zero as well. This means that every home user, when prompted to change their password, will simply change it to the password they had initially, making this setting useless.

Every so often I make a post whose main purpose is to get indexed by google and provide people with (what I think is) some nugget of useful information. Although googling for 8Ry2YjIyt7RRXU24 will yield a lot of results, none of them mention that this is the hash for a blank password on a pix firewall. (In other words, if you found this post because you have a Pix that has enable password 8Ry2YjIyt7RRXU24 encrypted set, that means the enable password is blank).

phpbb.com was broken into recently, and 20,000 passwords were revealed. There are two articles which attempt to draw conclusions from the data. One lists the 500 most common passwords, and the other does some analysis to try and get aggregate groupings.

The bottom line: no matter how much training we do, even reasonably internet literate people like the phpbb users, still pick crappy passwords. People don’t like remembering passwords, and therefore they find every conceivable measure to circumvent them. (See my previous post: all passwords are weak). If you’re developing a security system where the people who are supposed to be protected feel the need to circumvent the security, they will usually bring your security system down. Better to make a different system which is more transparent to the people who you’re trying to protect.

This looks like it could be a lot of fun. (You know, if someone were to try that. Not that I would ever participate in or condone such an activity). This just boils down to the fact that yet another embedded device has a default password on it that most people never change. The best protection in this case is probably to just lock the access panel.

The New York Times has an article on passwords and OpenID. Frankly, I couldn’t have said it better myself:

Computer security experts say that choosing hard-to-guess passwords ultimately brings little security protection. Passwords won’t keep us safe from identity theft, no matter how clever we are in choosing them.

…….

The solution urged by the experts is to abandon passwords — and to move to a fundamentally different model, one in which humans play little or no part in logging on.

Exactly what I’ve been saying.

Piggybacking on something I wrote about earlier, with the proliferation of WoW credential stealing bots, WoW is now offering two-factor authentication to its users. It makes sense frankly. WoW needs to keep their customers happy to keep their bottom line, and they’ve begun to realize that all passwords are inherently weak.