Risk Assessment / Security & Hacktivism

Why Intel’s “How Strong is Your Password?” site can’t be trusted

Lack of HTTPS + questionable metrics = don't rely on it.

A new website published by chipmaker Intel asks readers "How Strong is Your Password?" and provides a form for estimating the strength of specific passcodes. It's too bad the question isn't "How Strong is your Password-grading site," because the answer, unfortunately, is "not very."

The most glaring problem with the site is its failure to use standard HTTPS Web encryption. Based on the secure sockets layer and transport layer security protocols, HTTPS ensures that a Website being accessed is authentic and operated by a legitimate entity, as opposed to a knock-off page created by someone who is able to control the end user's Internet connection. It also encrypts traffic sent between the end user and site to prevent anyone else from eavesdropping. It wouldn't take much effort for someone to create a convincing replica of the McAfee-powered site and substitute it for the real one on a network in a coffee shop, at a conference, or in another setting. At that point anything a visitor typed could be sent to the attacker. Authoritarian regimes have also been known to inject code into legitimate sites to log account credentials.

To be sure, there are caveats. The site instructs users: "PLEASE DO NOT ENTER YOUR REAL PASSWORD," but I'd bet some percentage of users will ignore this request. Even then, the attack wouldn't reveal the user name corresponding to the password, or even the service or site they belong to. Still, the attack could be used in campaigns aimed at a specific individual or group to gain important insights about the passwords the targets use. More importantly, I'd expect a site with a goal of educating the masses about password security would tell users they should never enter a password on a plain HTTP connection. And I certainly expect Intel and its McAfee subsidiary to offer HTTPS on their own sites. The lack of encryption and authentication is surprising. I'd strongly discourage readers from entering any passwords they trust or use to secure important accounts.

The other problem with McAfee's site is the methodology used to rate the strength of passwords. The site estimates that it would take six years to crack the passcode "BandGeek2014" (minus the quotation marks) and three months to crack "windermere2313". Last week, I shoulder surfed as Jens "Atom" Steube, the lead developer of the freely available ocl-Hashcat-plus password-cracking program, decoded most of a list of 16,000 cryptographically hashed passcodes that were leaked on the Internet several months ago. It took him less than 30 minutes to break both of those passwords.

Conversely, the site says it would take only two years to crack "nIGpkQ8s.W6". That's a password I randomly generated for the purposes of this article, one that likely could be cracked only through the computationally painstaking process of brute forcing. Because it contains 11 characters and uses numbers, symbols, and upper- and lower-case letters, there are 9511 possible combinations, a massive "keyspace" that could take real-world crackers years centuries to exhaust.

The Intel site doesn't explain how it arrived at the conclusion that "nIGpkQ8s.W6" is three times faster to crack than "BandGeek2014"—and ultimately it doesn't matter. What's important is that this site should never be trusted with real passwords and can't even be counted on to give realistic assessments about the relative strength of passwords. By asking users, "Are you hackable or uncrackable?" it's crossing uncomfortably close into what security guru Bruce Schneier calls "security theater."

In the coming month or so, Ars will publish a series of articles showing how passwords are cracked in the real world and techniques end users can follow to prevent these attacks. Stay tuned.

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165 Reader Comments

  1. When I see a website with this description, I can't help but be reminded of a scammer who asks you to "send us all your money so we can scan your bills for counterfeit prints."
    5489 posts | registered
  2. Somebody needs to ask Intel to wise up and dump the idiotic page.
    1263 posts | registered
  3. binsamp wrote:
    dangoodin wrote:
    binsamp wrote:

    >>Dan, I'm surprised you take issue with these minor problems and completely miss the significance of what I wrote.

    >>The reference to collisions meant that two or more passwords could give the same hash. This means you coudl get a hit but still have the wrong password. That may or may not be important.

    >It's not that it's not important. It's that it's completely wrong. Collisions when hashing passwords never happens. Ever. Comments like yours do a disservice to other readers who are attempting to learn about this issue. It also makes it hard for me to believe anything else you have to say. Please, don't just take my word for it. Speak to some cryptographers and people who specialize in password cracking. Ask them if they've ever heard of a collision happening in password hashing. If you find a single documented case, please let us know. I'll gladly buy you lunch.

    I think it is obvious that people who specialize in password cracking will never find a collision. Once they get a hit, there is no reason to waste time on that hash so they remove it from the list. It is never checked again. This means they will never see a collision with a different password.

    As far as collisions go, it is a real issue, especially with MD5...

    Aaargh. Please, please, please. Unless you are one of the crypto specialists mentioned in your post(s), do not spread guesses / wrong information around.

    1) Lets start with your use of MD5 to prove collisions in a password list. MD5 is broken and no longer part of the set of valid cryptographic functions. You cannot use MD5 and its weakness to reason about other functions. Anyone can create MD5 collisions now, the algorithm exists. Sha1 is not quite as badly off but everyone is migrating off it. Sha3 was just accepted last year and will be the next frontier.

    2) Valid functions start at SHA2 and better. These are base 224, 256, 384 or 512 digests and then you apply a crypto algorithm on top of them (bcrypt, scrypt, pbdfk2 in our salted password case here).

    3) While the odds of a collision is not mathematically zero for all messages, what we are concerned with is the statistics of it. ... n-practice has some math to throw at it. To quote: "For instance, with SHA-256 (n=256) and one billion messages (p=109) then the probability is about 4.3*10-60". So that's a zero as far as we care +/- any weaknesses yet to be revealed. Note that any such weaknesses have a long way to go. Bottom line, you are incorrect in this universe as well as a rather large set of slightly different multiverses. The key space is that large.
    597 posts | registered
  4. binsamp wrote:
    The conclusion is a long random password effectively solves the problem of cracking hashes, and separating the functions of general web browsing and online banking into two independant virtual computers can go a long way to minimizing the risk of losing all your money to criminals...

    The VM idea is ok. You would have to know that the VM is not compromised though. As far as I know only Microsoft's secure boot gets you remotely close to that, but only for Win8. On the other hand since you are running a *nix box virtualized that is probably enough security through obscurity that you don't have to worry unless everyone starts doing it.
    597 posts | registered
  5. You could update the article to state that they are now using HTTPS on that site. I just clicked the link (May 28th) in the article and saw HTTPS in the address.
    7 posts | registered
  6. JGoat
    >I hate security questions, especially when they make you pick 3 from a short list,
    > I manage my passwords well, but now I'm doling out personal information to all
    > these sites so that some jackass who knows my mothers maiden name and where
    > I went to high school can reset my account? That's more likely than them figuring
    > out my passwords. So then you're using fake information for those questions but
    > have to keep track of all that just in case? Screw that. I like using a phone number
    > for recovery, but most sites don't let you get rid of the security questions.

    If you manage your passwords well, treat your security questions as additional passwords (i.e. randomly generated and stored in your password vault)

    Ditto for email addresses: randomly generate an email alias for each site that requires an email address to register. I don't know of a widely available service/tool that does this, but I plan to build one if I can't find one.

    This isn't a silver bullet, but it may help the .001% of people who "manage their passwords well".
    OTOH, imagine the cracking scene if 5% of the internet population *did* do this. (I imagine there would arise a new class of client-side malware that attempts to mimic the UI of the common password managers.)

    BTW: how clever of ArsTechinca to assume that I wanted my "username" displayed. ;-)
    6 posts | registered

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