Unique Passwords for Internet Accounts

With the widely publicized compromise of 1.2 billion user accounts from almost a half a million different websites, one very popular question is what can the average internet user do to protect themselves.

The common recommendations are straightforward:

• Use long, strong, and complex passwords
• Use different passwords for every website
• Change your passwords often, at least every six months
• Avoid storing sensitive information (passwords, social security numbers, or other identity information) online

These are the same, proactive recommendations that have been made for several years in response to password and credential breaches. However, historically users have been lax. For instance, among users directly affected by a large password attack, one survey found more than 1/3 of those users did not change their password at all. In 2013, the passwords “123456”, “12345678”, “password”, “qwerty”, and “abc123” continued to be the five most common passwords, just as they were in 2012 (see 2013's report here), even after many large, significant, and well publicized password thefts.

The challenge for users continues to be that secure practices are difficult to do, impact their productivity, and make useful resources harder to access anytime, anywhere. Users continue to make the tradeoff towards speed, productivity, ease of use, and universality — even as the risks and costs dramatically increase.

Ohanae believes that total cloud privacy protection is the solution to this epidemic. Although traditional password management is part of cloud privacy protection, it is not enough alone. Cloud privacy protection must include security of the password manager, so that it does not become a single point of failure, where all passwords can be compromised through it. Cloud privacy protection must include authentication that goes beyond a simple password, preferably by using multi-factor authentication to safeguard access to website credentials.Cloud privacy protection must safeguard data as well as credentials — enabling storage of sensitive, identity related data without risk of trickle-down account compromises if that data is accessed without authorization.

The Ohanae suite for Cloud Privacy Protection implements a password management function called Ohanae 1-Tap. Ohanae 1-Tap does not store passwords anywhere (on your device, on Ohanae’s servers, or in the cloud). Passwords are generated dynamically only when they are used, and generated by two factor authentication based on device and passphrase.

Ohanae’s Cloud Privacy Protection encrypts files stored in cloud storage providers — at creation on your device, during transmission across the Internet, and once stored in the cloud storage provider. The data is protected by strong, multi-factor authentication to dynamically generate decryption keys only on use — industrial strength technology to keep sensitive information in your files from the prying eyes of cyber criminals.

Finally, Ohanae knows that users have the need to securely share data with other collaborators, and supports secure transmission and use.

With Ohanae, it’s easy to establish unique, strong, lengthy passwords for every website, change them as often as you’d like, and have those passwords available on every device you use — whether desktop, laptop, or mobile. You can feel secure storing sensitive files online, and sharing them with others. And, in the unlikely event of a compromise, you have the confidence that the breach is limited — to just a single website, or a single cloud storage provider.

We can defeat the cybercriminals of the world and make epic password theft a news story of the past, and complete Cloud Privacy Protection is the way to do it! To get started, download Ohanae from http://www.ohanae.com today!

Two Factor Authentication Strength

Recent articles have suggested that password strength in some situations is not important. For instance, a recent Network World article asserted that the weakest and most well known password “123456” could have a place in an overall password strategy.

Another area where weak passwords are sometimes advocated is in combination with a two factor authentication (2FA) scheme. Two factor authentication combines two different pieces of information in order to establish access for a user. Typically, the two pieces come from two of the categories: something the user knows, something the user has, and something the user is. In most common, widely used schemes, the two factors are something the user knows (either a password or a PIN) and something the user has (a magnetic card, a secure token, or a specific device).

Adding a second factor certainly increases the security of a system. One could argue that you could decrease the first factor to offset that gain if the original system was secure enough. Taken to the extreme, if the second factor was stronger than the first, you could make the first trivially easy and still be better off. In that case, you would essentially be using a single factor system, just with the stronger factor.

Those are the keys to determining how much relaxation of one factor you can accommodate by adding a second factor: how strong is the second factor, how resilient is the system, and how independent are the two factors? How important is increasing the overall security of the system?

The classic two factor authentication system - a bank card and associated PIN works well. Both factors are strong. The card requires theft of a physical item to compromise it. The PIN (although only a 4-6 digit code) is usually strong because there is a lack of automated methodologies for attacking the PIN — it requires manually entering codes over and over at a banking machine. Furthermore, limitations on the number of wrong entries in a time period prevent effective brute forcing of the PIN. Systems are typically resilient — because there are not other attack modes beyond actual use of the card.

However, the card system can be compromised by poor choices. For instance, selecting trivial PINs like 1234, 0000, or other easily determined information makes it so that theft of the card is the only real attack required. Trivial PINs turn the two factor system in one factor, where possession of the card is the only block. Similarly, writing the PIN on the card so that the two factors are no longer independent (by compromising the card, you gain the PIN) also negates the benefits of the two factor system.

The final question is how important is increasing the overall security of the system. At Ohanae, we feel that passwords should always be strong, secure, and unique. If you need a password, then you want the best — whether it’s to secure less important websites, or as one piece of a multi-factor authentication scheme. Password compromise inevitably leads to information that can make secondary identity attacks easier and more successful. Your identity, accounts, and data integrity rest on preventing all attacks, and a weak password can be the proverbial weakest link that unravels the strongest chain of protection.

Ohanae’s cloud privacy protection solution gives users on all their devices the ability to quickly and easily use strong, secure, unique passwords on each website and application they use.

Password Manager Security

A recent CSO Online article summarized the findings of a UC Berkeley research team, finding that five browser based password managers contained security flaws that could lead to the compromise of login credentials they were protecting.

The research team’s work outlines an evaluation of password managers against their primary directive of ensuring that stored passwords are only accessed by the authorized user and the website that the password is for. Unfortunately, their evaluation found all five password managers contained flaws in their implementation.

In order to evaluate the password managers, the research team looked at five main attack vectors.

1. The password manager must maintain the integrity of the master account and password, making it impossible for an attacker to impersonate a valid user and retrieve credentials.
   
2. The password manager must securely store the list of credentials. The storage mechanism must ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the database. In particular, attackers should not be able to learn, modify, or delete credentials.
   
3. If the password manager provides sharing of credentials between users, then appropriate safeguards must be taken to maintain collaborator security.
   
4. The password manager must not operate in a way which allows user fingerprinting to happen. This would allow multiple, coordinated attacker websites to deduce identity information based on information passed between the websites by the password manager.
   

At Ohanae, we believe that password security is a key piece of our overall cloud privacy protection offering. We review some of the key vulnerabilities found, and how they apply with Ohanae below.

In the password managers surveyed, each provided a cloud based implementation that exposed the password store. In some implementations, the cloud-based password store was not encrypted, or data for the password store (usernames and passwords) were sent in the clear to the server in the cloud.

Ohanae does not store passwords in the cloud, or on local devices. Other credential information (domain and username) are stored on the local device, and passed through the cloud (for synchronization with other devices), but is encrypted during transmission and while stored.

Passwords are generated on demand only on authorized devices by a user with the master passphrase. This provides two factor authentication on local devices, and ensures that there is no static store which can be attacked and decrypted.

Finally, the master passphrase is only used, and not transmitted, even between devices of the same user — using Ohanae’s patent pending technology to ensure that sensitive passwords and pass phrases are retained and used only on authorized end devices.

Many of the password managers surveyed used bookmarklet technology to allow web browsers on popular mobile computing platforms (iOS and Android) to directly retrieve credentials from their stores. Due to the untrusted execution environment of bookmarklets, they require special handling to ensure that only secure APIs are called.

Ohanae does not use bookmarklet technology. We use secure browser extensions where available (primarily on our PC and Mac implementations), and rely on user copy and paste for insecure environments (such as most mobile operating systems).

Furthermore, since we only provide username and password to login forms, we do not add any additional data to form submission which would allow any type of fingerprinting operation.

The researchers also mention vulnerability of password managers to phishing attacks. In particular, allowing attacker websites to open dialogs which ask for the password managers username and password. Since the Ohanae application does not run inside the browser, it is easy to differentiate an attacker prompt (in a web UI) from the valid client login prompt.

Finally, at the time of this writing, Ohanae software does not provide a mechanism for sharing passwords between users. However, this feature is part of our product vision and roadmap, and we’ll pay close attention to the UCB research team’s recommendations in this area.

Ohanae believes, as the research team states that “password managers provide tremendous security and usability benefits at minimal deployability costs”, and we appreciate the time and effort the research team has spent to analyze typical attack vectors and the current state of the password manager art.

Ohanae is committed to providing industrial strength security in all three parts of our complete cloud privacy protection offering: securing login credentials, securing data in-motion and at-rest in cloud storage providers, and securely and collaborative sharing data.

Password Compromises of Large User Repositories

Today’s breaking news of the theft of eBay’s password and customer database highlights the danger implicit in the favored target of cyber criminals: large corporate repositories with millions of consumer records.

The eBay compromise poses particular business problems for eBay. Some of the highest costs for businesses with data compromise and theft include loss of customer trust and remediation of possible, unauthorized transactions. With eBay’s quick and informative disclosures, and thorough transaction audit, these are challenges that primarily affect eBay.

However, for customers in a breached database, the effects can extend beyond these corporate type of problem. The customer information in the database is a gateway for criminals to additional data. 

First, when passwords are contained in the compromised information, these passwords are often reused as credentials for other websites. A 2013 Ofcom study reported that 55% of users used a single password for the majority of web sites they accessed, only a slight improvement from 60% in 2011.  When passwords are stolen, and combined with other identifying information in the same database (such as user IDs or email addresses), a breach of a single website like eBay can be extended to breaches of a much wider universe of websites for affected consumers.

Second, the compromise of passwords often leads to the critical problem that an attacker can appear to be an authorized user. This lets the attacker gain access to the resources protected by the password. In the case of eBay, this is a user’s auction activity, but it varies depending on the compromised website. For example, a similar breach to a file sync and share website would result in attackers gaining access to user data files stored in the cloud.

Cloud privacy protection requires protecting both login credentials and the data stored in the cloud. Securing login credentials with unique, strong passwords limits exposure to the single compromised website. Securing cloud based data adds a second level of protection, even when the login credentials are compromised, to prevent data loss.