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Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2013 14:19:50 +1000
From: Michael Samuel <mik@...net.net>
To: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
Cc: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: CVE Request: pwgen
I've done some further analysis of the program after reading the previous
thread, and I think there needs to be CVEs and fixes for:
- When used from a non-tty passwords are trivially weak by default (first
reported by Solar Designer)
- Phonemes mode has heavy bias and is enabled by default (first reported by
Solar Designer)
- Silent fallback to insecure entropy (first reported by Jean-Michel
Vourgère) (Debian bug #672241 - tagged as "wishlist")
- Secure mode has bias towards numbers and uppercase letters
I've attached a patch that fixes most issues - it doesn't solve the bias
towards numbers, because it's caused by requiring at-least one number per
password - so in an 8 character password there'd have to be 0.1 numbers to
avoid bias. There's an argument to be made for removing the at-least-one
rule, but if the system that password is being used with has those rules,
it doesn't fix the problem anyway. Perhaps a separate flag for that?
The changes are:
- Print a message and abort() of there's trouble opening or reading
/dev/urandom (So apport should pick up any packages that have been using
insecure entropy)
- Make "-s" the default
- Add an argument --insecure-phonemes (or -P)
- Non-tty passwords are now as secure as tty
- Require lower-case characters be present to even out some bias
- Pull in passwdqc as a Suggests on the debian package - pwqgen can
generate sane random passphrases
I can't imagine any reasonable use-case for the non-tty defaults (except
maybe combining with espeak as an enhanced interrogation technique), and
you can be certain that there's some people out there with it embedded in a
script that's generating useless passwords.
For phonemes mode in general, the bias is extreme, there are a limited
number of possible combinations and it is generally not suitable for
security purposes. I have some fairly detailed analysis of it, but I
believe this list has a no-exploits policy...
Regards,
Michael
On 28 May 2013 11:47, Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 01:33:48AM +0000, Michael Samuel wrote:
> > The default mode of this program generates extremely low entropy
> passwords -
> > It is probably worth changing the default to "secure" mode and removing
> > phonemes mode, to avoid putting users at risk.
>
> Yes. You have seen the thread on pwgen from last year, right? -
>
> http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2012/01/22/6
>
> (Use the "thread-prev" link for more messages from that thread.)
>
> Alexander
>
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