Having been exposed to encryption methods like AES and Threefish, I’m not really interested in code breaking. From this point on, it’s just a game; the cryptography people use when they’re not just making a puzzle is as close to unbreakable as makes no difference. Ask a computer security guy to get his hands on some information, and he’s not going to try attacking the crypto, as such. He’s going to look for some other way to pry open the secrets.
For example, one of the more insidious ways of breaking encryption is to watch the encryption machine doing its work. If you have a smart card containing a SUPER SECRET PASSWORD that it will only send out encrypted, you may be able to discover this password by watching how much electrical current the smart card’s processor is using while it encrypts the password. If encrypting a ‘b’ generates one pattern on an oscilloscope, and encrypting a ‘Q’ generates another, then someone with an oscilloscope can trick the smart card into revealing the SUPER SECRETS contained within. There are so many ways that encryption hardware and software can leak information that such methods are usually much easier than attacking the cipher directly.
Similarly, think of how you might steal someone’s Less Wrong account. You could try to guess their password, but this is far too time consuming unless they set their password to “password” or “hunter2″ or something similarly obvious. If you happen to be on the same unsecured wireless network, though, you may be able to snoop on their packets and steal their session cookie. This bit of information is passed to the Less Wrong server every time you request a page; it’s called “reddit_session” and it tells the server that you’re logged in. If you steal someone else’s session cookie, you can be logged in as them, too. It’s not even hard.
Real security vulnerabilities, to me, are a lot more interesting than breaking deliberately simple ciphers. It teaches a remarkably clever, downright nitpicky way of thinking about how to extract the most use from each piece of information. It’s potentially useful, too, which is a nice bonus.
It’s an on keyboard character, and emprically people are waaaay more likely to use those. It’s also just one character, repeated. It has really, really low complexity. Given that there are dictionary attacks and rainbow tables covering any three word combination, with initial capitalisation and common letter number substitutions this is an incredibly weak password. Actually, either of any 7-character password or any password that is just one character, repeated are very weak, their intersection suffers from both problems.
Having been exposed to encryption methods like AES and Threefish, I’m not really interested in code breaking. From this point on, it’s just a game; the cryptography people use when they’re not just making a puzzle is as close to unbreakable as makes no difference. Ask a computer security guy to get his hands on some information, and he’s not going to try attacking the crypto, as such. He’s going to look for some other way to pry open the secrets.
For example, one of the more insidious ways of breaking encryption is to watch the encryption machine doing its work. If you have a smart card containing a SUPER SECRET PASSWORD that it will only send out encrypted, you may be able to discover this password by watching how much electrical current the smart card’s processor is using while it encrypts the password. If encrypting a ‘b’ generates one pattern on an oscilloscope, and encrypting a ‘Q’ generates another, then someone with an oscilloscope can trick the smart card into revealing the SUPER SECRETS contained within. There are so many ways that encryption hardware and software can leak information that such methods are usually much easier than attacking the cipher directly.
Similarly, think of how you might steal someone’s Less Wrong account. You could try to guess their password, but this is far too time consuming unless they set their password to “password” or “hunter2″ or something similarly obvious. If you happen to be on the same unsecured wireless network, though, you may be able to snoop on their packets and steal their session cookie. This bit of information is passed to the Less Wrong server every time you request a page; it’s called “reddit_session” and it tells the server that you’re logged in. If you steal someone else’s session cookie, you can be logged in as them, too. It’s not even hard.
And then, of course, there are things like SQL injection attacks, now also known as Bobby Tables attacks. Those are just fun.
Real security vulnerabilities, to me, are a lot more interesting than breaking deliberately simple ciphers. It teaches a remarkably clever, downright nitpicky way of thinking about how to extract the most use from each piece of information. It’s potentially useful, too, which is a nice bonus.
I don’t get it—why is ******* an obvious password?
It’s an on keyboard character, and emprically people are waaaay more likely to use those. It’s also just one character, repeated. It has really, really low complexity. Given that there are dictionary attacks and rainbow tables covering any three word combination, with initial capitalisation and common letter number substitutions this is an incredibly weak password. Actually, either of any 7-character password or any password that is just one character, repeated are very weak, their intersection suffers from both problems.
http://www.bash.org/?244321