• 0 Posts
  • 583 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle



  • With the hash one, it doesn’t look like that could be exploited by an attacker doing the bad hashing themselves, since any collisions they do find will only be relevant to the extra hashing they do on their end.

    But that encryption one still sounds like it could be exploited by an attacker applying more encryption themselves. Though I’m assuming there’s a public key the attacker has access to and if more layers of encryption make it easier to determine the associated private key, then just do that?

    Though when you say they share the same secret, my assumption is that a public key for one algorithm doesn’t map to the same private key as another algorithm, so wouldn’t cracking one layer still be uncorrelated with cracking the other layers? Assuming it’s not reusing a one time pad or something like that, so I guess context matters here.




  • I remember hearing to not layer encryptions or hashes on top of themselves. It didn’t make any sense to me at the time. It was presented as if that weakened the encryption somehow, though wasn’t elaborated on (it was a security focused class, not encryption focused, so didn’t go heavy into the math).

    Like my thought was, if doing more encryption weakened the encryption that was already there, couldn’t an attacker just do more encryption themselves to reduce entropy?

    The class was overall good, but this was still a university level CS course and I really wish I had pressed on that bit of “advice” more. Best guess at this point is that I misunderstood what was really being said because it just never made any sense at all to me.






  • I’m just tired of people trying to sell me shit. Or beg. Like I know I’m not interested 3 words in to the spiel but still feel like an asshole if I just say no and close the door or hang up the phone.

    Though I did eventually tell my phone provider to put me on their no call list for their internet marketing because I got tired of them trying to get me to switch to their less good internet package.

    Hoping (but not holding my breath) that we, as a society, squash the whole data broker thing sometime relatively soon, though.





  • Yeah no worries and agreed. I hate seeing commercial sites using worse password sanitization practices than I used for my first development website that wasn’t even really intended for anyone else to log in to and any max length suggests the password is either stored or processed in plaintext.

    IMO it should even be hashed on the client side before being sent so that it doesn’t show up as plaintext in any http requests or logs. Then salted and hashed again server side before being stored (or checked for login).


  • Correct, hence the sentence after the one you quoted :)

    If any service can recover your password and send it back to you rather than just resetting it for you to set a new one, don’t rely on that service for anything you want to keep secure. And certainly don’t reuse a password there, though you shouldn’t be reusing passwords anyways because who knows what they are and aren’t storing, even if they don’t offer password recovery.


  • Once upon a time, battle.net passwords weren’t case sensitive. I used upper and lower case letters in my password then one day realized I didn’t hit shift for one of the caps as I hit enter out of habit, but then it still let me in instead of asking for the password again.

    It was disappointing because it takes more work to remove case-sensitivity than to leave it. I can’t think of any good reason to remove it. At least the character limit had a technical reason behind it: having a set size for fields means your database can be more efficient. Better to use the size of a hash and not store the password in plaintext, so it’s not a good reason, but at least it’s a reason.



  • Some examples from mine if anyone is curious. I never use the fb sso or any of that shit, nor did I ever explicitly consent to any of these services sharing anything with fb.

    • Spotify
    • bookings .com
    • ebay (haven’t touched my account there in over a decade but they still had data to send this year)
    • windy .com
    • duolingo
    • tinder
    • my bank
    • opera
    • sonos (I can’t think of any time I’ve ever even interacted with this one)
    • samsung wallet (another one I never even set up)
    • Uber eats
    • calorie counter
    • mediacom usa and euro (?)

    Also, if you remove access via messenger app, it will show a confirm message without closing the screen. Clicking x goes back and it’s not on the list anymore. Whether they are actually leaving it disconnected or just hiding it, who knows.

    Some of these services I didn’t use the same email that I used for fb, too, or any email at all.