Programming

17344 readers

383 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

151

OP finds vulnerability where a forum sends you your password in plaintext over email and everyone misses the forest for the trees (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

86 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This thread is frustrating. Everyone seems more interested in nitpicking the specifics of what OP is saying and are ignoring that a forum sends you your password (not an automatically generated one) in an email on registration.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They have said it is being hashed for storage: https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=669268#Post669268

I can’t fault the OP though, if I received such an email I would assume it is stored in plain text and be similarly upset.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reversible hashed password storage isn't meaningfully better than clear text.

The key to reverse the hash is typically (necessarily) stored in the same infrastructure as the password. Bad actors with access to one have access to the combination.
Even if an attacker fails to exfiltrate the key to the reversible hash, it's typically only a matter of days at the most before they can reverse engineer it, and produce plain text copies of every password they obtained the hash of.

A reversible hash provides a paper thin layer of protection against accidental disclosure. A one way hash is widely considered the bare minimum for password storage.

Anyone claiming a password has been protected, and then being able to produce the original password, is justly subject to ridicule in security communities.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The one they were sending at registration was prior to hashing. It would not be reversible afterwards.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's technically less terrible, then.

Good for them. /s

Edited to add the /s for clarity, because the NIST recommended remediation in 2023 for emailing a password is "burn everything down and pretend the organization never existed". /s

Again, adding that /s since that's not actually what NIST says to do, and I am, at best, paraphrasing.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

I wasn’t trying to claim what was happening here, simply that one (extremely) bad practice increases the chance of another.