Larion Studios forum stores your passwords in unhashed plaintext.
Larion Studios forum stores your passwords in unhashed plaintext. Don't use a password there that you've used anywhere else.
Hello, c/Games mod here.
For everyone infosec culture, hashing and salting password consist in using one-way mathematical functions to encrypt passwords. It is a very commonly used security practice to make it more difficult for an attacker that was able to steal a database to obtain the password. As the website is unable to decrypt said password (thank to the one way mathematical function), the only way to send you back your password in this manner is to have it unhashed and unsalted in his database.
In the current case, this is a registration email, which may have been sent before the initial hashing and salting. In this case we cannot say for sure if Larion Studios indeed have unhashed and unsalted password in his database.
That doesn't really mean that they store it in plain text. They sent it to you after you finished creating your account, and it's likely that the password was just in plain text during the registration. The question still remains whether they store their outgoing emails (in which case yes, your password would still be stored in plain text on their end, not in the database though).
Your guess is confirmed here.
There are plans to update the forum, including for better security (the main issue with changing the forum software is concern over reliably migrating all of the existing content). After emailing (admittedly not current best practice), the passwords are hashed and only the hash is stored.
...and later...
The forum has been updated to https, and passwords are no longer being sent by email.
Which raises the question of how old OP's screen shot is.
Also, no, the password would not necessarily still be stored in plain text on their end. The cleartext password used in that email might be only in memory, and discarded after sending the message. Depends on how the UBB forum software implemented it and how Larian's mail servers are set up.
EDIT: I just verified that this behavior has resurfaced since it was originally fixed. OP would do well to responsibly report it, rather than stirring up drama over a web forum account.
OP would do well to responsibly report it, rather than stirring up drama over a web forum account.
¿Porque no los dos?
Took them 23 years to fix it last time, seems public awareness would be important in the interim, no?
I actually think this is the case. I could be completely wrong but I swear I saw the same question like 6 years ago in another forum software that looks exactly like this one lol. And people compalined about it storing plain text, but the response when asking the forum people was that it was only during that password creation, it's not actually stored.
I don't know if it's crazy for me to think it's the same forum from that many years ago, still doing the same thing and getting the same question.
Yes, still not worth risking using a duplicate password though.
Honestly, why risk duplicate passwords even then? I have one strong password that I use for accessing my password manager, and let the password manager generate unique random passwords. Even if I had an easier password that I duplicated with some small changes, I'd still use a password manager to autofill it anyway. I use bitwarden personally, you can also self host it with vaultwarden but it seemed like more trouble than it was worth imo
Applies to every site ever
We all know that they store it in plain text.
Don’t use a password
therethat you’ve used anywhere else
Just get a password manager already
I just wanted to drop a reminder that both LastPass and Norton LifeLock have been hacked within the past year alone.
KeePass is a thing that exists and is fantastic.
And here's a reminder that trusting centralized service with high security access control is usually a bad idea.
I stay away from LastPass for the same reasons I stay away from TeamViewer. Security through obscurity on top of decoupling my security interests from others means other people being attacked is much less likely to cause me harm at the same time
And at least for LastPass no passwords were compromised. Saying they "were hacked" and leaving the extent of the hack out implies something worse IMO, it's misleading. The safes themselves are E2E encrypted so they also don't have your password.
That said, my vote is to Bitwarden as it's open source and allows self hosting if you think you're a more reliable admin than they are. Open plus more choice is always better.
One vote for 1Password here.
I literally trust them with my life. Agreed.
This is the correct answer.
That's very unlikely. It's running UBB Threads, which, from what I can tell, has an auth subsystem, which au minimum would do hashing. If it's providing you with a default at sign-up, that's different and is what appears to be a configurable setting.
If it is completely generated for you, here's what probably happening:
TL;DR as this is running on a long-established commercial php forum package, with DB storage, it is incredibly unlikely that the password is stored in the DB as plaintext. At most it is likely stored in memory during creation. I cannot confirm, however, as it is not FOSS.
no, they probably dont.
they just send it to your email upon registration, which is kinda a bad idea, but they are probably storing passwords hashed afterwards.
So it's in plaintext in their email system
these emails don't usually get copied to local outbox folder (as any oher auto generated emails)
password may end up in cache somewhere tho....
and this is why it's a bad idea and rarely done nowadays
Generated emails usually don't get saved, as soon as it is delivered it will be gone.
I've literally never had a service provider email me my own password ever. Maybe a OTP, but never my actual password. And especially not in plaintext.
What would be the necessity behind emailing someone their own password? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of having a password? Email isn't secure.
Idk if I'm misremembering, but it's my impression that they did this a lot in the 2000s, haha. I guess bad practices have a habit of sticking around
I've had service providers physically mail my own password to me before. Just crazy.
Always use unique passwords for every site.
"Kinda a bad idea?" This is fucking insane.
Is it though? While it certainly isn't something I'd recommend, and I've encountered it before, if E2E encryption exists we cannot assume a data exposure had occurred.
What they do on the backend has nothing to do with this notification system. Think of it as one of these credentialess authentication systems that send a 'magic link' to your inbox.
this is still a terrible idea. the system should never know the plaintext password.
logs capture a lot even automated emails. i don't see a single reason to send the user their plaintext password and many reasons why they shouldn't
passwords are usually hashed server-side tho and that's done for a reason.
if handling passwords correctly, server side hashing is way more secure then client-side. (with client side hashing, hash becomes the password...)
But that still means they had your plaintext password at some point.
Edit: which, as some replies suggest, may not actually be much of an issue.
I'm still skeptical about them returning it, however.
Um. Yeah, because you provided it to them. They have to have it in plain text in order to hash it.
You can also tell if a site does this when they have seemingly arbitrary restrictions on passwords that are actually database text field restrictions.
Especially if they have a maximum password length. The maximum password length should be just the maximum length the server will accept, because it should be hashed to a constant length before going into the database.
I recently created an Activision account during a free weekend event and discovered their password system is completely broken. 30 character limit but refused to accept any more than 12 characters. Kept erroring out with must be less than 30. Once I got it down to 12 it accepted that, but then it complained about certain special characters. Definitely not giving them financial information.
My bank has a character limit, but they don't tell you about it; they just trim the password you've set before hashing + saving it, then when you go to login if you don't trim your password the same way they did, login fails.
I only know this because the mobile app will actually grey out the login button as soon as you enter more than the character limit. The web app just leaves you to be confused.
My bank if you get your card number through the app has a dynamic ccv that changes every day so while not perfect is what I use whenever purchasing online
Especially if they have a maximum password length.
Not really, there are good reasons to limit password length. Like not wanting to waste compute time hashing huge passwords sent by a malicious actor. Or using bcrypt for your hashes, which has a 72 byte input limit and was considered the best option not that long ago. The limit just has to be reasonable; 72 lowercase letters is more entropy then the bcrypt hash you get out of it, for example.
Yes, reasonable limits are fine, I was talking more like 12 or 13 characters max. That's probably indicative of a database field limit, and I've seen that a fair amount because my password manager defaults to 14 characters.
Sending your password right after you created it might not be best practice, but it doesn't mean it's stored unhashed in the database. It looks like they're using a third party forum software, so it should be pretty straightforward to figure out whether they do or not.
Looks like they address it here: https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=669268#Post669268
it should be pretty straightforward to figure out whether they do or not
Not really since it's closed-source: https://www.ubbcentral.com/
But they seem to have been in business since 1997, so I highly doubt that they'd fuck up the "never store passwords in plain text" rule.
Yeah, I was looking it up, and when I saw they've been selling this forum software since 1997 I was less confident about passwords being hashed. They address it in their forums and they're making it clear that the passwords are actually hashed, and they're looking at migrating to other solutions regardless.
Set your password to an EICAR test string and see what else you can brick on their site.
Holy shit beautiful. Now I wanna try it everywhere
While sending your password in plaintext over email is very much a bad idea and a very bad practice, it doesn't mean they store your password in their database as plaintext.
It's 2023, I really hope people are not using the same password in multiple places. Password managers solved this problem a decade ago. Use one, with multi factor auth on important sites like email.
There are people who purposely forget their passwords, so they use the "forgot my password" link every time they need to login.
Hard to hack them.
Yeah some sites also dont have passwords, they just send a login link to your email every time.
I prefer passwords so I don't have to go to my email to log in, but I understand it's easier for some people to do it that way. Your email address becomes your identity then.
That's just 2FA with extra steps
Oh, they are. I keep telling people to WRITE DOWN YOUR PASSWORDS, and NEVER use same password on two sites. They dont listen. Its a lot easier to just remember 1-4 variations of a password and use that than carry around a password notebook. And they think themselves safe.
I'm thinking most people shouldnt use passwords at all anymore. They are a huge point of failure because people are people. We need something else to be the norm. How can we make hardware keys or something the norm for logging in? Have everyone carry around a bankcard-like thing that fit into every computer where people need credentials. Would'nt that be safer while still being accessible and convenient?
There are yubikeys you can use to login, but it requires installing stuff on each computer you want to access. Nothing is simpler then passwords. :)
I used a yubikey for a while, they are alright, but I could only use it for logging on to a computer, not for logging into specific sites. Even though I guess that could be solved with a password manager integration.
Oh, they are. I keep telling people to WRITE DOWN YOUR PASSWORDS, and NEVER use same password on two sites. They dont listen. Its a lot easier to just remember 1-4 variations of a password and use that than carry around a password notebook. And they think themselves safe.
Honestly, the best solution for this is a password manager and not a notebook. The average person is not going to come up with strong passwords on their own for every website. A password manager once setup can be more convenient than whatever they were doing before, so if you can get people to use one they'll be in much better shape.
I’m thinking most people shouldnt use passwords at all anymore. They are a huge point of failure because people are people. We need something else to be the norm. How can we make hardware keys or something the norm for logging in? Have everyone carry around a bankcard-like thing that fit into every computer where people need credentials. Would’nt that be safer while still being accessible and convenient?
My understanding is that this is basically what the whole passkeys initiative is. I have sort of mixed feelings on it. Hardware tokens for logging in is great, but I worry about people stealing the hardware tokens from others. Mostly people are going to use their phones, though, which should have some other mechanism of authentication.
suggest something like this
use your favorite password but add the site to it
so your lemmy password would be ilovemypasswordLEMMY
and your reddit password would be ilovemypasswordREDDIT
that way they can keep their shitty password but it won't be the same password on every site and they have an easy way to remember what the proper password is for the site they want to accesss
I've used the same password for everything since 1991. If anyone's cracked it, they haven't attempted to get into my shit. Probably because there's nothing worthwhile to steal.
"I've never had covid, so it doesn't exist" vibes.
First of all they wouldn't know there's nothing worthwhile until they got in. But most importantly if you're using the same password for everything since 91 there's around a 0% chance that password hasn't been leaked. This means that a random person can have access to everything that you have that's not 2fa protected without you even noticing. You said that no one tried to get into your things, how would you know? Most places don't let you know when someone login successfully, and a lot of other places do so with an email which the attacker can quickly delete.
If you really use the same password for everything since a long while back anyone who knows your email address can get into anything yours, getting a hold of one of those password dumps is really easy, especially older ones.
For those who haven't made accounts yet, you don't actually have to make an account to play Larian Studios games.