{"id":1770,"date":"2009-12-20T10:41:20","date_gmt":"2009-12-20T08:41:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/code.openark.org\/blog\/?p=1770"},"modified":"2009-12-20T10:42:06","modified_gmt":"2009-12-20T08:42:06","slug":"passwords-which-are-bad-for-your-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/code.openark.org\/blog\/mysql\/passwords-which-are-bad-for-your-health","title":{"rendered":"Passwords which are bad for your health"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve seen some passwords to take a few years from my life.<\/p>\n<p>I mean, we all know about <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dictionary_attack\">dictionary words<\/a>, right? And we&#8217;ve all seen <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0094012\/\">Spaceballs<\/a>, right? But choosing <strong>12345<\/strong> as your password is not the only careless option: there are many more! The more I get familiar with user&#8217;s password, the more I see how so much alike they all are.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s review some of the commonly used bad password practices:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Empty passwords. Need I say more? Apparently yes. So what if <em>&#8220;there&#8217;s only access through firewall from our company&#8217;s IP&#8221;<\/em>?<\/li>\n<li>Dictionary passwords: real English words like &#8216;<strong>falcon<\/strong>&#8216; or &#8216;<strong>tiger<\/strong>&#8216;. Don&#8217;t use these! These are the easiest to attack.<\/li>\n<li>Well known words: how about &#8216;<strong>Gandalf<\/strong>&#8216;? It&#8217;s not dictionary, but it&#8217;s popular enough to appear in any respectable list. For that matter, look at how well filtered passwords are on RedHat: you can&#8217;t choose a password which is a common first or last name in the US, Italy, or even Israel; which is great!<\/li>\n<li>Common substitues: enough with &#8216;<strong>1nsi9ht<\/strong>&#8216; and &#8216;<strong>@dm1n<\/strong>&#8216;! These are almost as easy to break as dictionary words; it&#8217;s just a matter of a few more combinations per word.<\/li>\n<li>Keyboard clustered: say <em>No!<\/em> to &#8216;<strong>1qa2ws<\/strong>&#8216;. Don&#8217;t use &#8216;<strong>$rty&amp;*io<\/strong>&#8216;. They seems to be random at first sight, but look for them on the keyboard: it&#8217;s just your common <em>&#8220;how shall I create a password that&#8217;s so easy to remember I will never forget it?&#8221;<\/em>. Now <strong>REPLACE(&#8220;remember&#8221;, &#8220;break&#8221;)<\/strong> and <strong>REPLACE(&#8220;never forget&#8221;, &#8220;always regret&#8221;)<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>Children&#8217;s names, birth dates, <strong>123456<\/strong>, your car&#8217;s license plate number, your <em>Yahoo!<\/em> mail password, etc. etc. etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There are many guidelines for <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Password_strength#Guidelines_for_strong_passwords\">choosing strong passwords<\/a>. And everyone seems to know about it. But I&#8217;m still surprised when I find out the MySQL root password is &#8216;<strong>zxcvbn<\/strong>&#8216; or &#8216;<strong>pa55wd<\/strong>&#8216;.<\/p>\n<p>MySQL allows for any character in your password, so you may use punctuations, spaces, and other symbols. This is stronger than plain characters and digits.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->I think it all boils down to one question: do you really need to <em>remember<\/em> the password? If so, go ahead and use some personal hints, and make it difficult for the intruder.<\/p>\n<p>If not &#8211; and you can store the passwords, encrypted by stronger passwords on a secure server; on plain paper on your bookshelf; behind your mother&#8217;s cupboard, embedded between her Bridge winnings notes &#8211; then use as strong a password as you can get.<\/p>\n<p>A good tool which I&#8217;ve begun to use recently is <strong>pwgen<\/strong>. For example:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<pre>$ pwgen -cn 32 1\r\nna5thoeh4jaeth9OoMooBiosoophuShi\r\n$ pwgen -ycn 32 1\r\nzahC0eehei.tee0pahL3sej2ohv^e8me<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>pwgen<\/strong> can be instructed to produce or not to produce digits, uppercase letters, special characters, and is very handy.<\/p>\n<h4>Conclusion<\/h4>\n<p>Not all my passwords are so strong; I make the distinction between critical data, confidential data, personal data; the damage done by exposing a password; etc.<\/p>\n<p>If your server is behind firewall, that means you have a reason for not letting people in. Take the next small step and choose strong passwords for your OS, database, htaccess and the rest of the gang.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve seen some passwords to take a few years from my life. I mean, we all know about dictionary words, right? And we&#8217;ve all seen Spaceballs, right? But choosing 12345 as your password is not the only careless option: there are many more! The more I get familiar with user&#8217;s password, the more I see [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[16],"class_list":["post-1770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mysql","tag-security"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2bZZp-sy","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/code.openark.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/code.openark.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/code.openark.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/code.openark.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/code.openark.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1770"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/code.openark.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1774,"href":"https:\/\/code.openark.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1770\/revisions\/1774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/code.openark.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/code.openark.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/code.openark.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}