Strong passwords in a multiple authentication environment

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One of the challenges of coming up with a reasonable password complexity policy is taking into account the relative strengths and weaknesses of the operating environments those passwords will be used in. Different operating systems have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to password strength. Different environments have different threat exposures.

The two biggest things to worry about for brute-force password problems are random guessing, and hash-grab-and-crack. I'm ignoring theft or social engineering for the moment, as plain old password complexity doesn't do a lot to address those issues. Random guessing is the reason intruder lockout was created. Hash-grab-and-crack is what pwdump1/2/3/4 was created to do, with offline processing.

Password guessing will work on any system, given sufficient time. Not all systems even permit grabbing the password hashes, like NDS passwords, where others are rather well known (/etc/shadow). Grabbing the password hashes is preferred, since it permits offline guessing of passwords that won't trip any intruder-lockout alarms.

As for OS-specific password issues, we have three different systems here at WWU. Our main student shell server is running Solaris8, so passwords longer than 8 characters are meaningless; only the first 8 characters count. Our eDirectory tree is running Universal passwords, so passwords of any length are usable. Our Windows environment is not restricted to NTLM2 which means we have NTLM password hashes stored; and in this era of RainbowTables any password shorter than 16 characters (of ANY character, regardless of char-set) is laughably easy to crack if you have the hash.

This leads us to strange cases. This password:
1ßÜb$R=0
Is very, very secure in Solaris, but laughably easy in Windows. And this password:
0123456789abcefBubba2pAantz
Is a very good Windows password, but laughably easy on Solaris.

So, what are we to do? That's a good question. Solaris passwords prefer complexity over length, and Windows passwords prefer length over complexity. This would imply that the optimal password policy is one that mandates long (longer than 16 characters) complex (the usual rules) passwords. Solaris will only take the first 8 characters, so the complexity requirement needs to be beefy enough that the first 8 characters are cryptographically strong.

One of the first things a hacker does once they gain SYSTEM access on a windows box is dump the SAM list on that server. I've seen this done every time I've had to investigate a hacked server. When the machine being hacked is a domained machine, the threat to the domain as a whole increases. So far I haven't seen a hacker successfully dump the entire AD domain. On the other hand, one memorable case saw the SAM dump at 12:06am and a text-file containing the cleartext passwords was dumped including the local-administrator account (a password 10 characters long, three character sets, no dictionary words, in other words a good Solaris password) at 12:17am; clearly a Rainbow Table had been used to crack it that fast. This was almost two years ago.

One problem with long, complex passwords that are complex enough in the first 8 characters is the human memory. 8-10 characters is about as long as anyone can remember a gibberish password like "{BJ]+5Bf", and it'll take that person a while to learn it. Going the irregular-case and number-substitution route can add complexity, but cryptographically speaking not a lot. Password crackers like John the Ripper contains algorithms to replace "a" with "4" and "A", to make sure your super secret password "P45$w0r|)" is cracked within 1 minute. Yet something like "FuRgl1uv2" works out, as it contains bad spelling.

Never underestimate the cryptographic potential of bad spelling. Especially creative bad spelling.

We still haven't solved this one. We're working on upgrading Solaris to a version that'll take longer passwords, and the resultant migration that'll required. We know where we need to go, but getting the culture at WWU shifted so that such requirements won't end up with a user revolt and passwords on post-its is the problem. Two-factor is not viable for a number of reasons (cost, and web-access being the two top ones). Mandatory password rotation is something we only do in the 'high security' zone (banner), not something we do for our regular ole systems. It's a bad habit we're trying to break, but institutional inertia is in the way and that takes time to overcome.

If Microsoft decided to salt their NTLM hashes, and therefore render Rainbow Tables mostly useless, we wouldn't be in this mess. They've seen the light (NTLM2, and whatever Vista-server will bring out), but that won't help all the legacy settings out there. NTLM is already legacy, yet we have to keep it around for a number of reasons, right up there being Samba doesn't speak NTLM2.

Who knows, it may end up that what solves this for us is getting Solaris to take long passwords, rather than educating all of our users on what a good password looks like.

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1 Comment

Sort of curious why you categorize that first password as "laughably easy" to crack on Windows, but the second one as "good" for Windows. If you process them both off-line, that second one is pretty easy to crack on any system, it just takes a little longer due to the extra digits. I mean, there aren't any special characters, so, it's just a simple brute force "try them all until the crc/hash matches" attack. Lots of programs out there to do that. Or, just get L0phtCrack, which will do it in a fraction of the time.And on that first one? Other than it being a bit short, what makes you think it's easier to crack via Windows than Solaris? I'm not critisizing, understand, but if there's a new/better password cracker for either Windows or Solaris, I'd love to know about it. I can never have too many new toys, er, tools. (And, if you don't want to advertise those, feel free to contact me privately via e-mail or my website.)