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Password Woes

Happy belated International Change-Your-Password Week! Earlier this month, thanks to the generous sponsorship by the great folks at Adobe, people all around the world were changing their passwords and tech blogs were parroting guidelines for choosing a strong password. But let’s be honest – passwords are a hassle. And, as Adobe was so kind to remind us, even the strongest unique password can be an open door if the company storing it isn’t doing so competently.

As someone who is a programmer, I’m aware of several technical solutions to our password woes. As someone who suffers from cynical realism, I believe the barrier to adopting these solutions to be red-tape and human nature (ego and laziness). There’s no reason for every website to require their own login credentials when OpenID and OAuth exist. Perhaps we should increase liability for password storers and provide incentives to the crackers who hack them. A smart company would migrate to an SSO-provider to mitigate their responsibility and the provider would be diligent in protecting the hashes.

But as much as anyone would like to mitigate responsibility, the fact remains that it’s the individual who’s most affected by password breeches, not corporations. Are there secure ways to ease the burden of password management?

I’ve been trying out KeePass this past week and my overall impression of the program is fair to middling. I’m storing the encrypted password database to Dropbox for the computers I use the most, and keep a duplicate copy of the database on a thumbdrive with a portable version of KeePass for when I need to use someone else’s computer. Although the premise seems secure, and I trust their implementation to be solid, some of the program’s incidentals frustrate me.

KeePass is fine on Windows but almost unusable on Linux. Unfortunately in this case, a good 90% of my day is spent using Linux. I've also noticed that the Auto-Fill feature toggles back to the most recently used window, so if an IM dialog pops up while I'm toggling to KeePass, the password is leaked. I could spend some time scripting in the advanced sections to safe guard against this, but that seems like a hassle.

I’ve also pondered the idea, so long as it contained accented characters, whether I might be able to get away with using the same password for everything. If the website is using proper encryption practices (Blowfish with scalable cost – i.e. Bcrypt – and random salt) then a rainbow table attack is going to be useless. Those sites that aren't have already proven their incompetence, so they probably don't know how to handle UTF-8 correctly either. The password value would be corrupted, truncated, or filtered, and most likely result in differing hashes between different sites... almost like using the site’s algorithm as your own salt! And brute-force crackers probably aren’t using Esperanto dictionaries; “@D0B3.fuŝ1s!” seems secure, doesn’t it?

Ultimately, programs like KeePass only serve as a bandage and don’t address the core problem, and ubiquitous use of SSO-providers is still a pipe-dream. While we’re all stuck in Password Hell, waiting for the next password-change holiday, the best we can do is keep Clifford Stoll’s advice in mind: “Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.”

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