![]() Having a strong password, even if you’re using software that could potentially be exploited, is still better than nothing. There are still hundreds of thousands of people online who secure their accounts with the word “password” as their password. It won’t protect you from ALL accidents but it is still better than not wearing a safety helmet at all. If you visit a construction site, you’re advised to wear a safety helmet. No single security software is foolproof.īut as security researcher Troy Hunt has noted, “ Password managers don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be better than not having one“. No single security software is foolproof…and that includes safe password managers. Let me be blunt: if you’re relying on a single piece of software or a single strategy to secure yourself online, you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed and possibly hacked. Image credit: emrcartoons.Note: Some of the links in this article are affiliate links, which means that at no extra cost to you, I may be compensated if you choose to use one of the services listed. Make sure that you are running at least Kaspersky Password Manager for Windows 9.0.2 Patch F, Kaspersky Password Manager for Android 9.2.14.872, or Kaspersky Password Manager for iOS 9.2.14.31, and you should be safe.įull details of the researchers' finding are available here. So what is the takeaway from this? In short, if you are using Kaspersky Password Manager, you need to make sure that it is completely up-to-date to ensure that your passwords are not going to be crackable. The lack of randomness created by KPM's solution, along with the fact that if the creation time of an account is known, an attack can be made that much quicker, highlights the fact that even random password generators can't be relied upon to keep malicious actors away. Super computers are able to go through billions of attempts per second to brute force a password. Mike Newman, CEO of My1Login, responded to the news by saying: "The main goal of a random password generator is to create passwords that are virtually impossible to crack, so to hear Kaspersky's random password generator could be brute forced due to design blunders is alarming". The discovery has shocked the security community. Hi Matthew, here's an update regarding the issue. Kaspersky points out that the issue was addressed last year: Incidentally, writing this PoC allowed us to spot an out of bounds read during the computation of the frequency of appearance of password chars, which makes passwords a bit stronger that they should have been. It can be used to verify the flaw is indeed present in Windows versions of Kaspersky Password Manager < 9.0.2 Patch F. That means every password generated by vulnerable versions of KPM can be bruteforced in minutes (or in a second if you know approximately the generation time).įinally, we provided a proof of concept that details the full generation method used by KPM. But the major flaw is that this PRNG was seeded with the current time, in seconds. Its internal structure, a Mersenne twister taken from the Boost library, is not suited to generate cryptographic material. We also studied the Kaspersky's PRNG, and showed it was very weak. We showed how to generate secure passwords taking KeePass as an example: simple methods like random draws are secure, as soon as you get rid of the "modulo bias" while peeking a letter from a given range of chars. However, such method lowers the strength of the generated passwords against dedicated tools. This method aimed to create passwords hard to break for standard password crackers. Kaspersky Password Manager used a complex method to generate its passwords. ![]() While the caveat that "an attacker would need to know some additional information (for example, time of password generation)" is valid, the fact remains that Kaspersky passwords were significantly less secure than people were led to believe. The issue was assigned CVE-2020-27020, where the old version of the password manager is described as being "not completely cryptographically strong and potentially allowed an attacker to predict generated passwords in some cases". This meant that "all the passwords it created could be bruteforced in seconds". Most significant is the fact that the PRNG used a single source of entropy - the current time. Millions of Dell devices at risk due to SupportAssist security vulnerabilitiesĭonjon researchers found that the password generator included in Kaspersky Password Manager had several problems.Microsoft urges PowerShell users to upgrade to protect against critical vulnerability.Microsoft issues emergency patches for critical PrintNightmare security flaw.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |