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| bio | website | |
|---|---|---|
| location | ||
| age | ||
| visits | member for | 1 year, 11 months |
| seen | Mar 16 at 22:01 | |
| stats | profile views | 79 |
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May 14 |
awarded | Nice Answer |
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Mar 2 |
answered | Necessary education for InfoSec? |
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Dec 13 |
answered | Authentication without saving password |
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Sep 28 |
answered | Changing IP ID generation of a server |
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Aug 27 |
revised |
Keeping the password secret over regular http added 405 characters in body; added 3 characters in body |
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Aug 27 |
answered | Keeping the password secret over regular http |
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Aug 27 |
revised |
What is a cryptographic puzzle? added 2 characters in body |
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Aug 23 |
comment |
Is asymmetric encryption ever recommended for long-term storage? PS: If your largest concern is server compromise, add a HSM into the above asymmetric key scheme so that compromised "public" keys plus encrypted data cannot be used 20 years in the future to decrypt the data, since the HSM was not stolen and is not available for use as oracle (assuming the compromise was detected and remedied within those 20 years). Improving client security is harder. |
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Aug 23 |
comment |
Is asymmetric encryption ever recommended for long-term storage? Chose the asymmetric keys with some security margin and treat "public" pairs as sensitive secrets on the server. Replace the asymmetric keys when needed, re-encrypting the actually used symmetric keys, and destroy the old counterparts. This scheme is anyway advisable since you must consider key compromise. Obviously you also need backups of those private keys. A secret sharing scheme can be used here, so that e.g., 3 out of the 5 top managers/chiefs must collude to restore your private key. Given this construction, the weakest link will be the symmetric key temporarily stored on your desktop. |
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Aug 22 |
comment |
Is it safer to use less heard of software than popular software? "I'm discounting the security of relying on a probability" - This is a very academic view. In practice, security is risk management, and thus a probabilistic process. People don't have time to design everything perfectly. Companies base their decisions pro/contra some software on many indicators, but in the end its a probablistic process. I also disagree with independence from popularity. IMO there is clearly a correlation in cases where other software with mostly identical functionality exists. Alternatives become known and used (e.g., sendmail and alternative MDAs). |
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Aug 22 |
awarded | Nice Answer |
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Aug 22 |
revised |
Is it safer to use less heard of software than popular software? added 817 characters in body |
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Aug 22 |
comment |
Is it safer to use less heard of software than popular software? Unfortunately, its basically infeasible for a non-security expert or people without lots of practical experience to determine these metrics (analysis, measures, patching) for a given software. Most you get is a sourceforge project page or a vendor homepage with PR gibberish. |
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Aug 22 |
answered | Is it safer to use less heard of software than popular software? |
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Aug 22 |
comment |
Is it safer to use less heard of software than popular software? Care to substantiate that last claim? |
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Aug 16 |
comment |
SMS Authentication: random OTP or a cryptographic one Just to be double safe, use a primitive that expects a key as input and is designed to do authentication based on that key, like an HMAC. Hashes are usually iterative constructions which in some situations can make you vulnerable to concatenating or replacing parts of the hash-inputs. In the above scenario it probably does not matter, but like rolling your own crypto you want to avoid rolling your own crypto-protocols. |
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Aug 10 |
comment |
How secure is the SRP that Blizzard uses to protect passwords? @Polynomial: The article seems a little biased to me. How many compromises do we know of where some DB was actually created using bcrypt-like technology with decent scaling factor? Doing this is probably also makes regular authentication quite expensive for large-scale providers. The only (conservative) way around this are HSMs, but they are either very expensive or very slow. |
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Aug 10 |
comment |
How secure is the SRP that Blizzard uses to protect passwords? @Ramhound: Typically, the credential used to perform more and other transactions is considered more critical than the transaction itself. |
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Aug 10 |
revised |
How secure is the SRP that Blizzard uses to protect passwords? added 312 characters in body |
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Aug 10 |
answered | What is a cryptographic puzzle? |
