As a governance analyst it is part of your duties to assess the level of protection offered by implemented controls and minimize the probability of a successful breach. You often need to know the techniques used by hackers to circumvent implemented controls and propose uplifts to increase the overall level of security in an organization. Gaining valid credentials gives the attackers access to the organization’s IT system, thus circumventing most of perimeter controls in place.
What type of hashing algorithm was used to protect passwords? What level of protection does the mechanism offer for passwords? What controls could be implemented to make cracking much harder for the hacker in the event of a password database leaking again? What can you tell about the organization’s password policy (e.g. password length, key space, etc.)? What would you change in the password policy to make breaking the passwords harder?
After the conducted analysis it was determined that organization uses an outdated password hashing algorithm (MD5) which offers very little protection in the event of a password database leaking. It was also determined that the current password policy is not aligned with industry best practices allowing users to have short passwords (6 characters) and reuse usernames as part of passwords.
As a result of the analysis the following uplifts are proposed to increase the overall level of password protection:
• Use a dedicated password hashing algorithm bcrypt, scrypt or PBKDF2 as this will greatly increase the time needed to crack individual passwords,
• Implement salting to prevent usage of rainbow tables to speed up cracking,
• Increase the minimum password length requirement to 10 characters – this will increase the computational effort required to crack password and will give additional time to change all passwords in the event of the password database being leaked,
• Prevent passwords to be the same as usernames or reused as part of the password – such password combination is easy to check without gaining access to the password database itself.
• It is advised to educate users on creating safe and easy to remember passwords. Having a password policy requiring long passwords with a number of special characters results in user writing passwords down or constantly resetting them. The best way to create a strong and user-friendly password is using passphrases (e.g. mygrannyschairhadstaples). The best way to create such passwords is to combine a couple of completely random word. It’s also advised to use some special characters and numbers as easy to remember substitutions to expand the key space (e.g. mYgranny$cha1rhadstaples)
• Educate users on the benefits of passwords managers. Having a password manager allows having very long and completely random passwords (e.g. M>?{tk6Cfep6BrZ4J)KZWQ8j) without the need to remember/write down. A strong passphrase is still required as a master key for to access the password manager.
Completing this task assigned by Goldman Sachs, MD5 and SHA were the two algorithms that I came across. Analysing the passwords and their respective security algorithms used, I narrowed down my observations into this report.
Dear Sir/Ma’am After trying to crack all the leaked hashes, I found several vulnerabilities in your password policy and this email concludes all the findings and suggestions to improve your password policy. Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) and Message Digest (MD5) are the standard cryptographic hash functions to provide data security for authentication. All the password which are compromised were using MD5 which is a weaker hash algorithm and is prone to collisions. It was very easy to crack with Hashcat.com and rockyou.txt wordlist via terminal and web browsers. I would suggest that you use a very strong password encryption mechanism to create hashes for the password based on SHA. After cracking the passwords, we find the following things about organization’s password policy: • Minimum length for password is set to 6. • There is no specific requirement for the password creation. Users can use any combination of word and letters to create a password. You can include several new things in your password policy. My recommendations are: • Avoid common words and character combinations in your password. • Longer passwords are better, 8 characters is a starting point. • Don’t reuse your passwords. • Include special character, Capital and Small letters, numbers in your password. • Don’t let users include their username, actual name, date of birth and other personal information while creating a password. • Train your users to follow these policies to keep their passwords safe.
Thanks, and regards, Chaitanya Sudhakar Shikhare MSc Data Analytics and Decision Science
Security Algorithms used:
experthead:e10adc3949ba59abbe56e057f20f883e – MD5 interestec:25f9e794323b453885f5181f1b624d0b – MD5 ortspoon:d8578edf8458ce06fbc5bb76a58c5ca4 –MD5 reallychel:5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99 –MD5 simmson56:96e79218965eb72c92a549dd5a330112 – MD5 bookma:25d55ad283aa400af464c76d713c07ad – MD5 popularkiya7:e99a18c428cb38d5f260853678922e03 – MD5 eatingcake1994:fcea920f7412b5da7be0cf42b8c93759 – MD5 heroanhart:7c6a180b36896a0a8c02787eeafb0e4c – MD5 edi_tesla89:6c569aabbf7775ef8fc570e228c16b98 – MD5 liveltekah:3f230640b78d7e71ac5514e57935eb69 – MD5 blikimore:917eb5e9d6d6bca820922a0c6f7cc28b – MD5 johnwick007:f6a0cb102c62879d397b12b62c092c06 – MD5 flamesbria2001:9b3b269ad0a208090309f091b3aba9db – MD5 oranolio:16ced47d3fc931483e24933665cded6d - MD5 spuffyffet:1f5c5683982d7c3814d4d9e6d749b21e - MD5 moodie:8d763385e0476ae208f21bc63956f748 - MD5 nabox:defebde7b6ab6f24d5824682a16c3ae4 - MD5 bandalls:bdda5f03128bcbdfa78d8934529048cf - MD5
Cracked Passwords:
experthead:e10adc3949ba59abbe56e057f20f883e - 123456 interestec:25f9e794323b453885f5181f1b624d0b - 123456789 ortspoon:d8578edf8458ce06fbc5bb76a58c5ca4 - qwerty reallychel:5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99 - password simmson56:96e79218965eb72c92a549dd5a330112 - 111111 bookma:25d55ad283aa400af464c76d713c07ad - 12345678 popularkiya7:e99a18c428cb38d5f260853678922e03 - abc123 eatingcake1994:fcea920f7412b5da7be0cf42b8c93759 - 1234567 heroanhart:7c6a180b36896a0a8c02787eeafb0e4c - password1 edi_tesla89:6c569aabbf7775ef8fc570e228c16b98 - password! liveltekah:3f230640b78d7e71ac5514e57935eb69 - qazxsw blikimore:917eb5e9d6d6bca820922a0c6f7cc28b - Pa$$word1 johnwick007:f6a0cb102c62879d397b12b62c092c06 - bluered
https://howsecureismypassword.net/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_cracking#Software