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I have been fretting over the question of hacked userids/passwords. As I understand it, the stolen password is not actually the password but a hashed version of it which the hacker then decodes by brute force and ignorance to arrive at the actual password. But what if that wasn't the actual password. What if the system I was using performed some sort of transformation before it hashed the password for storage.
For example, when I log on to my account, I type in pass123 as my password, but unbeknown to me, the system translates that to 321ssap, hashes it and stores it.
The hacker tries to log onto my userid and types in 321ssap as my password which is what he thinks it is. This gets translated to 123pass and hashed for checking. But that hash value is not the same as the one that is stored. Therefore an "Incorrect password" error message is generated.
Am I missing something here?
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xiecsuk wrote: As I understand it, the stolen password is not actually the password but a hashed version of it
In most cases, lately reported over media, it was plain text... 
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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No one would be that would they, not now... [sarcasm icon not needed]
veni bibi saltavi
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Seriously, my (mandatory) car insurance company sent me the current password in plain text when I clicked on "forgot my password" (turned out I didn't forget my password, they simply changed the accepted character set for the passwords between my logins so my password wasn't valid but I couldn't log in to change it. Had to spend 3 days on the phone and threaten them with Hell, Damnation and going to another company). That means either my password was stored in clear text or it was sotred in such a way that it was recoverable. That is BAD.
Geek code v 3.12
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- r++>+++ y+++*
Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
// No comment
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Relax - it was no trouble to retrieve your password...It was stored as plain text to avoid any future problem 
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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also to speed things up we have now stored it on 500000 servers location in dubious countries around the world
You cant outrun the world, but there is no harm in getting a head start
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
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No, no - they store your password and check it as a nice secure SHA-2 hash value.
And in case you need to recover it (as you did) they store the plain text version in the same table!
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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no that was the old way, now its just stored as "password" so their is no need to decrypt it (saves the NSA 5000 man hours a month )
You cant outrun the world, but there is no harm in getting a head start
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
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I had a profile on a site that continually (daily) sent me "we want you back" emails. I ignored them, but last week I noticed that they included my username and password -- in case I had forgotten. 
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"Page 1 of 289"
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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you're on the front page? well done
You cant outrun the world, but there is no harm in getting a head start
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
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Wrong.
The hacker would need to know what hash is being employed to perform an attack and would, most probably have had their own user set up as a known value to check their attack. So maybe they'd see past the subterfuge.
Or maybe someone else is wrong.
veni bibi saltavi
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Also easier to prevent by including some salt, as already discussed quite some times. Companies ain't gonna spend money if it is not required, and people cannot enter the database, so why not store it as plain text?
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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The password is (shuold be) never sent in any form to the server, normally the authentication is a challenge based one.
In phase of registration there is a secure connection where you actually send your password to the server.
Then the login is done by challenge: the server creates a chunk of random data Ri, sends them to the client and at the same time encrypts them using the hash of the password it has stored, creating the encrypted challenge Ci.
The client receives Ri and encrypts using the hash of the provided password, then sends the encrypted chunk Cj to the server.
The server then compares Ci and Cj - if they're equal then the loign is successful.
The main reason because the password should never be sent in any form is to protect from Man In The Middle attacks: if an attacker can sniff your login packet then it may send it again on later times, sending the encrypted password directly to the server with a custom made login packet.
Geek code v 3.12
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- r++>+++ y+++*
Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
// No comment
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I am mathematican.And my english isn't good. So sorry if I fail to make oneself understood.
I have studied cryptology for a little while. I can say that: Hash code's inverse functions's solutions calculates forever.
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Yes but a brute force dictionary attack confronting to a DB of hashed passwords does not. It is a common bruteforce:
hash("aaaa") = $1. Does $1 exist in the DB?
hash("aaab") = $2. Does $2 exist in the DB?
....
long, as brute force attacks are, but it works. Unless there is some salt in the hashed password.
Geek code v 3.12
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- r++>+++ y+++*
Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
// No comment
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xiecsuk wrote: Am I missing something here?
Quite a lot, because it's pretty complicated. Firstly, you are assuming they've hashed the password, some (even large companies) don't they use a symmetric algorithm. If a company can send your password to you, say via e-mail, they are using a symmetric algorithm (at best).This is insecure.
The idea is the hashing is one way, so the hash cannot be reversed, so password123 ---> 7FDEADBEEF or whatever. It the password table is stolen there are two immediate vulnerabilities. First off, if the system allows a bad password such as "password" this is going to be the most common value stored in the password field across the table, and you can work backwards through the most probable ones. The second vulnerability is something called a rainbow table, this reduces the amount of time it takes to reverse engineer a password that is going to lead to a particular hash. Worse, these tables are readily available, so you don't need the compuation time to get started.
You can salt the password (adding a random bit of text which you store) in various ways, e.g. add then hash or has the password, salt then hash the result. This mitigates against the vunerabilities described above, but given enough time brute force strategies will always win - even if enough time means from now until after the end of the universe.
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See my reply here : http://www.codeproject.com/Messages/5021585/Re-Am-I-right-or-am-I-right.aspx
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Correct. To horse with passwords, you need a battery of scripts, to handle the myriad staple functions that protect them.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Do we get extra points when understanding the reference here ? Or minus points for those who don't ?
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Minus points for those that don't read XKCD regularly. 
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