[sf-perl] OT: Secure password storage
Adam Masri
masri at nolex.com
Thu Jan 15 16:32:13 PST 2009
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On Jan 15, 2009, at 7:26 AM, Daniel Lo wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> My old Palm Pilot: Tungeston-T died a week ago.
>
> Now I have to find a new method of password storage. The problem I
> am facing is
> that I can't find any devices suitable for password storage.
>
> What did I store on my PDA?
>
> Financial passwords. (Liability rests on me to keep it secure and
> the company
> disclaims all liability for stolen passwords: of course)
>
> System passwords. (My job if these are stolen.)
>
> However, now all PDA's have wifi, bluetooth, USB ports, and Irfd and I
> evaluate these devices on what they are capable of, not what the
> software allows
> for (Paris Hilton having all of her phone numbers stolen). So, when
> I saw that
> the pocket PC came with Internet Explorer I overflowed my joy
> buffer. Storing
> my passwords on a device that is capable of silently sending out
> information
> without any detection (and runs IE) isn't that great.
>
> All of my passwords are garblygook that I have a hard time
> remembering for
> example: C:j2Tc3K9#@ would be a sample password. And I use the same
> method for
> those questions: Where were you born? "I was born in (c1)32CSF}"
>
> The only thing I can think of is to store my passwords in a pocket
> PC in
> "PasswordSafe: http://www.schneier.com/passsafe.html" with an
> additional
> mnemonic password encoding.
>
> So that C:j2Tc3K9#@ would be stuck with the following rules:
>
> Every 3rd character is incremented by its ordinal value by one.
>
> C:j2Tc3K9#@ would be C:i2Td3K0#@
>
> Now, if you have read this far, I'm sure most of you think I need to
> be sent to
> the funny farm. But what hacks have I seen/heard about in the last
> 3 months?
>
> 1. IE: all password can be stolen
> 2. Adobe: buffer overflow execute allows for arbitrary code run.
> 3. DNS: hack.
> 4. That neat trick on how to extract memory on a computer after it
> has been
> turned off. (That was really cool).
>
> And financial companies say push the liability for stolen passwords
> on to the
> user.
>
>
>
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Adam Masri masri at nolex.com
President www.nolex.com
Nolex
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