Bugtraq mailing list archives
Re: Secure Storage of Secrets in Windows
From: eivind () YES NO (Eivind Eklund)
Date: Wed, 19 May 1999 23:21:57 +0200
On Wed, May 19, 1999 at 09:42:51AM +0300, Olaf Titz wrote:
The Win32 API provides such service. Although in the past it was found that its encryption was rather weak Microsoft claims to have fixed it, no one else has claimed otherwise, and its better than nothing.Since this allows the encryption of user data and Microsoft ist U.S. based , the algorithm _must_ be weak. Otherwise they could have used just RC4 with the password as key instead of RC4 with a 32 bit(!) hash of the password. This is not Microsoft stupidity but U.S. government stupidity. With today's CPU power 32 bit of key is not better than nothing. I could brute force that in one week with my single PC.
I'll just note that back when PWL breaking was fairly new, Frank Stevenson (mostly) with a tiny bit of help from yours truly optimized a breaker for this to run in just under 24 hours on a Pentium 90 (or perhaps it was a Pentium 66 - I no longer remember). The next day Frank found the vulnerabilities that let us crack the passwords in no time at all, due to incorrect initialization of RC4, but we had it under 24 hours before that :-) Eivind.
Current thread:
- Secure Storage of Secrets in Windows Aleph One (May 17)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Secure Storage of Secrets in Windows Nick FitzGerald (May 18)
- Re: Secure Storage of Secrets in Windows Bronek Kozicki (May 20)
- Re: Secure Storage of Secrets in Windows Olaf Titz (May 18)
- Buffer Overruns in RAS allows execution of arbitary code as system Mnemonix (May 19)
- Re: Secure Storage of Secrets in Windows Eivind Eklund (May 19)
- NetBSD Security Advisory 1999-010 matthew green (May 21)
- Re: NetBSD Security Advisory 1999-010 Olaf Kirch (May 21)