Archive for the ‘Passwords’ Category

Battle.net authentication misconceptions

Filed under: Passwords, Reverse Engineering

Hey everybody, There have been a lot of discussion and misconceptions about Battle.net's authentication lately. Having done a lot of work on the Battle.net protocol, I wanted to lay some to rest. The first thing to understand is that, at least at the time I was working on this, there were three different login methods [...]

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Permalink Comments (21) Ron Bowes May 24, 2012

(Mostly) good password resets

Filed under: Hacking, Passwords

Hey everybody! This is part 3 to my 2-part series on password reset attacks (Part 1 / Part 2). Overall, I got awesome feedback on the first two parts, but I got the same question over and over: what's the RIGHT way to do this? So, here's the thing. I like to break stuff, but [...]

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Permalink Comments (9) Ron Bowes Mar 24, 2011

Hacking crappy password resets (part 2)

Filed under: Hacking, Passwords, Tools

Hey, In my last post, I showed how we could guess the output of a password-reset function with a million states. While doing research for that, I stumbled across some software that had a mere 16,000 states. I will show how to fully compromise this software package remotely using the password reset. The code First, [...]

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Permalink Comments (5) Ron Bowes Mar 15, 2011

Hacking crappy password resets (part 1)

Filed under: Hacking, Passwords, Tools

Greetings, all! This is part one of a two-part blog on password resets. For anybody who saw my talk (or watched the video) from Winnipeg Code Camp, some of this will be old news (but hopefully still interesting!) For this first part, I'm going to take a closer look at some very common (and very [...]

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Permalink Comments (11) Ron Bowes Mar 9, 2011

Ethics of password cracking/dissemination

Filed under: Conferences, Hacking, Passwords

It's rare these days for me to write blogs that I have to put a lot of thought into. Most of my writing is technical, which comes pretty naturally, but I haven't written an argument since I minored in philosophy. So, if my old Ethics or Philosophy profs are reading this, I'm sorry! Introduction Anybody [...]

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Permalink Comments (11) Ron Bowes Jan 24, 2011

Followup to my Facebook research

Filed under: Passwords

Hey all, Some of you may have heard what I did this month. It turns out, depending on who you listen to, that I'm either an evil "Facebook hacker" or just some mischievous individual doing "unsettling" research. But, one way or the other, a huge number of people have read or heard this story, and [...]

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Permalink Comments (24) Ron Bowes Aug 12, 2010

Return of the Facebook Snatchers

Filed under: Hacking, Passwords

First and foremost: if you want to cut to the chase, just download the torrent. If you want the full story, please read on.... Background Way back when I worked at Symantec, my friend Nick wrote a blog that caused a little bit of trouble for us: Attack of the Facebook Snatchers. I was blog [...]

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Permalink Comments (142) Ron Bowes Jul 26, 2010

robots.txt: important if you're hosting passwords

Filed under: Passwords

This is going to be a fun post that's related to some of my password work. Some of the text may not be PG13, so parental discretion is advised. As most of you know, I've been collecting password lists. In addition to normal password lists that are useful in bruteforcing, I have a (so far) [...]

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Permalink Comments (3) Ron Bowes Mar 16, 2010

The ultimate faceoff between password lists

Filed under: Nmap, Passwords

Yes, I'm still working on making the ultimate password list. And I don't mean the 16gb one I made by taking pretty much every word or word-looking string on the Internet when I was a kid; that was called ultimater dictionary. No; I mean one that is streamlined, sorted, and will make Nmap the bruteforce [...]

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Permalink Comments (14) Ron Bowes Mar 11, 2010

Hard evidence that people suck at passwords

Filed under: Passwords

Hey everybody! As you probably know, I've been working hard on generating and evaluating passwords. My last post was all about Rockyou.com's passwords; next post will (probably) be about different groups of passwords from my just updated password dictionaries page. This will be a little different, though.

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Permalink Comments (0) Ron Bowes Mar 6, 2010