FYI: Steam accounts were hacked (around 10th November)

[LP]

I mean, the number 3.3 years (or 1204days) was a little irrelevant to the topic because passwords aren't normally just small letters. 4032yrs he counts for a..Z,0..9 which is 1471680 days. Given 100000 times more processing power multimedia computer network would crack that in 2 weeks. Now add to that a complex encryption algorithm that multiplies calculation time for single word by 1000. That's propably what AES-256 or something would do.

You are continuously basing your arguments on Nirvana fallacy by assuming unrealistic base case scenario and supporting your arguments on False dilemma fallacy by assuming that the solutions you have mentioned are the only ones to exist (or assuming lack of better alternatives thereof).

Yes, some people like yourself, me and others on this forum might use different letters and symbols, but inexperienced people, which are the majority, keep using passwords with the name of their pets, ex-girlfriends, movie characters and even their own names. You also keep insisting that the password is perfectly unique, has perfect entropy, has been salted properly, has been hashed properly and that no information is used about the user to guess the password faster. You also assume that hackers will be using some non-professional freeware program made by some random guy on a random machine that was meant to run some games and word applications to crack the perfectly ciphered password.

If you wish to tie yourself to unrealistic theoretical best-case scenarios to achieve false sense of security, it is okay, but I believe that in this particular case of hacked Steam accounts doing so would be a mistake.

[paul_nicholls]

LOL! Wow! I certainly started a big 'discussion'!

[LP]

LOL! Wow! I certainly started a big 'discussion'!

Stream is actually a popular topic and the security concerns everybody, so something interesting can come up out of these discussions.

In my own case I'm lucky not to use Steam, but what would happen if to the same degree GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo accounts would get stolen?

[User137]

Nobody has really given any counter argument to math i have provided. I gave different propability scenarios that should give some kind of hints. It's true that:
- If you prove that bruteforcing through all password combinations takes 1000000 years, how likely is it that someone can optimize the algoritm by 99.9999% so that calculation is done in reasonable time?
- You don't have to bruteforce the full range of random words, just up till first match. You may be lucky sooner or later.
- If no salt is involved, you can use many optimizations like premade lists that guess by ignoring unlikely words like aaa*, bbg* and so forth. There can be alot more optimizations i don't know about.
- If hackers get to know salt algorithm they wouldn't need to go through all 128-256 lengths, but usual 8-10 char lengths that are unsalted passwords.

This wasn't Steam talk now. There is nothing to discuss about it as long as we have no details on how their systems work. In general, if hackers get access to passwords its fault of other things. Low security systems. Most hacked sites that get news popularity propably had their passwords stored as plaintext. Properly encrypted system is truly unbreakable, there's just too many web hosters that make errors in 1 thing or another. It is tough to protect against all possible attacks, but that is a different topic.

It is that you make encryption sound as breakable as cookie that makes me defend it so heavily. To give another simple example, if i selfkeep a 256 bit xor key for text, how would you be able to crack the text? Nobody could, in million years.

[LP]

<edit>
After some thinking I've got your point that you are only defending the encryption method itself. There are also some flaws in the reasoning you provide to which I do not agree, but maybe this is for a another discussion.

To resume, my point is that although in a perfect scenario it is infeasible to break 256-bit encryption on a purely theoretical level, the specific case of stolen Steam account information has a high chance (e.g. bigger than 50%) of being revealed to third party, even though it *might* have used 256-bit encryption to secure its data.

[SilverWarior]

All I wanted is to point out that having ecrypted data does not guarantee its security. Nowadays computers and especialy computer clouds offer huge computational power wich makes data encryption wich has been considered perfectly safe a few years ago, not so safe anymore. If we are hones no data encryption is perfectly safe.

But now I'll point out another thing that might result in ever bigger discusion.

What if hackers don't have to do any data decryption afterall?
Various articles about Steam hack only says that data from the user accounts database was stollen, but no article wich I read doesn't says how that was done. If hackers managed to copy database data as copying database file-s then they will definitly need to decrypt the data before using it. But what if they managed to copy database data by interfaceing to the database itself fooling it that they are some steam web application? This way they might have managed to retrive already decrypted data as usualy data encryption is done with database engine itself.

If we take into account that steam system isn't run just on one server it means that the database itself had to be globally available. This means that hacker had ability to imposter as being one of those servers and accesing a database this way. Offcourse they needed to have proper database login creditentials to gain acces to the database data, but since it isn't very likly that database creditentials are being periodicaly changed they had lot's of time in trying it out (trying a few hundreds of password one day, a few hundreds next day, and so on). All that they had to do is keep number of login trials (guesing of passwords) low enough for not trigering anny alarms and that is all.

[User137]

Nowadays computers and especialy computer clouds offer huge computational power wich makes data encryption wich has been considered perfectly safe a few years ago, not so safe anymore. If we are hones no data encryption is perfectly safe.

And i don't agree with that Not all encryptions are perfectly safe, but some are. You may have also noticed increasing amount of sites which demand password to contain at least 1 number and capital letter, to improve even the bad ones.

If we take into account that steam system isn't run just on one server it means that the database itself had to be globally available. This means that hacker had ability to imposter as being one of those servers and accesing a database this way. Offcourse they needed to have proper database login creditentials to gain acces to the database data, but since it isn't very likly that database creditentials are being periodicaly changed they had lot's of time in trying it out (trying a few hundreds of password one day, a few hundreds next day, and so on). All that they had to do is keep number of login trials (guesing of passwords) low enough for not trigering anny alarms and that is all.

From end to start, the password guessing is in my opinion history already, unless system is built really bad. Admins will most likely get big red alarms after 5 wrong password attempts already, and ban the IP. They can shut it down if they see the attacks continuing on numerous IPs. Well, it doesn't require even admins, systems can prevent repeated attempts automatically usually.

If i was admin to such cloud server network, i'd use same IP whitelist for each server. As we know, the hackers were able to crack into something else than normal steam login because otherwise they wouldn't access all users at once. So, if each server only allows connections from other servers that are in the whitelist, wouldn't that solve everything? Admins themselves only need localhost connection to the server they are at. Allowing remote connection to big amount of data can be a root of problems. Even most server software (FileZilla FTP, Apache etc) lets admins only login from local network, by default.

[LP]

Various articles about Steam hack only says that data from the user accounts database was stollen, but no article wich I read doesn't says how that was done.

This is actually very speculative. From what we can tell, they could just as well put a gun on sysop's face in an armed assault to the datacenter, download the necessary data in raw unencrypted format and be gone. Who knows...