[ale] OT - New encryption technology using a piece of paper

[planas]

Hi folks,

On Sat, 2011-09-03 at 14:29 -0400, Michael Trausch wrote: 

> On 09/03/2011 10:45 AM, Ron Frazier wrote:
> > Hi guys,
> > 
> > I just finished listening to episode 315 of Steve Gibson's Security Now 
> > podcast. He's invented a new encryption system that works using just a 
> > piece of paper (once the piece of paper is created). He uses a specially 
> > designed character grid modeled after Latin Squares (don't ask me what 
> > that is) which allows you to encrypt passwords for each website you 
> > visit using just the piece of paper. I haven't had any time to study the 
> > method, but I thought it was interesting so I'm passing it along. Here 
> > is a quote from his website:
> > 
> > quote on -->
> > 
> > This “Off The Grid” technology is the only known system to provide
> > 
> > secure encryption using nothing but a specially designed piece of paper.
> > 
> > Although this system initially uses software to design and print the 
> > grid, no technology of any kind is used to perform the encryption. Every 
> > other strong and modern encryption technology relies upon software 
> > running in your computer, your browser, your phone, or some other device 
> > to encrypt, decrypt, or store your passwords. And as everyone knows, any 
> > software-based system can be compromised by malware . . . and sooner or 
> > later, most are.
> > 
> > <-- quote off
> 
> As can nearly always be proved, security relies not only on the
> competency of the people running systems and services, but that of the
> end user.  And perhaps just as importantly, _any_ system that aims to
> provide useful security must not sacrifice a significant amount of
> convenience.
> 
> This system is, from the very outset, not very difficult to use.  But it
> is time-consuming in that the human is very error-prone, and humans can
> not be relied upon to perfectly follow the steps to any algorithm with
> efficiency.  But that's just the start.
> 
> He shows an example on his site where he creates a password using
> "amazon" as the input, presumably for amazon.com.  The resulting
> password that he came up with was "gcznegmacmzg".  This is a horrible
> password.  And the "full scale" grid uses only 52 possible characters
> for output; that is, upper and lower case letters.
> 
> Now, let's assume for a moment that the password is being used with a
> service that actually does things (mostly) right and stores only salted,
> hashed passwords (to do things completely correctly, they should have a
> mandatory KDF that runs for at least 25,000 rounds, but given that most
> people are stupid enough to design systems to store passwords in
> plaintext anyway, this is an unreasonable expectation).  The strength of
> the password against a brute-force attack if you have a 12 character
> password that consists of only upper and lower case letters is _weak_,
> and here is why:
> 
>  * 52 possibilities for each letter means that each character requires
>    only 6 bits if you are storing a unique identifier for each
>    character (with 12 such identifiers left as extras; two raised to the
>    sixth power is 64).
> 
>  * The probability that there will be repetition in the password, given
>    the low symbol count and the low available number of symbols to use
>    is rather high.  Looking at the example that Gibson used above:
> 
>      - "g" appears 3 times
>      - "c" appears twice
>      - "z" appears twice
>      - "n" appears once
>      - "e" appears once
>      - "m" appears twice
>      - "a" appears once
> 
>    So, there are only 7 unique characters in that 12 character password.
>    Armed with this knowledge, it is possible to generate a more targeted
>    table for hash generation and greatly reduce the number of hashes
>    required for a brute force attack (alright, not quite brute force,
>    because we're talking about adding some intelligence to it, but it is
>    still more or less brute force).
> 
>    In the above example, the number of possibilities for a password is
>    95,428,956,661,682,176.  However, given the low entropy, a
>    directed attack need only likely attempt as many as 8,031,810,176
>    12 character hashes.  To give you an idea of how silly-low that is,
>    I can compute 10 million hashes on 12-character values in about 14.5
>    seconds on my system---using a single threaded program written in
>    Python.  Add the ability to use all 6 of my CPUs, I could get that
>    down to about 3 seconds.  Do it in a highly streamlined C or
>    assembler program and I could probably do better than that by at
>    least 10 times.
> 
>    This means that my system can compute 1 hash every 0.0000015 seconds.
> 
>    For the keyspace of 52 values, used in the "normal" situation, I can
>    compute all likely combinations in about 70 hours on my system, using
>    all of its CPUs and a Python program.  That is _not_ secure at all.
> 
>    Note that if a KDF is used and that KDF requires 0.01 seconds of CPU
>    time, I go from an estimated 70 hours required to crack a single
>    salted password to an estimated 700,000 hours (about 80 years) on my
>    lone little computer.  Using 100 computers equipped like mine (not
>    an unreasonable number of them!) it goes down to about 300 days, or
>    just under a year.  Use an entire botnet to do it and you can STILL
>    have the individual password in probably just minutes.
> 
> So, yeah.  Not secure at all.  Or, put better:  It's about as secure as
> far too many systems on the Internet are, using replicated MySQL
> databases to store plaintext passwords for your wonderful applications.
> 
> So the best advice is probably to use high-entropy passwords (like a
> password card with symbols on it, which fits in your wallet and is far
> better than Gibson's latin squares system), use a password for at most
> ONE system (or at a stretch, family of systems in the same
> administrative domain), use passwords that are at a bare minimum 12
> characters (because on a secure system they aren't going to be cracked
> anytime soon, especially if there is a strong KDF required to compute
> the actual key), and do your best to steer clear of providers that don't
> spend the time or money to make your security their business, as it
> should be.
> 
> 	--- Mike
> 

As Mike pointed out, any password can be broken with enough computing
power and sufficient time. The real issue is that most people tend to
use the same password or the a very small number of passwords. The real
problem is once a cracker gets the password and email account the user's
identity can be compromised easily. Often users have easily cracked
passwords. I know of people who will use word combinations like
redsturgeon because it is "too hard" to use random characters. They are
always asking are people able to crack their email, etc.

-- 
Jay Lozier
jslozier at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20110903/4b8a6760/attachment.html