

LinkedIn admits passwords were stored unsalted - jgrahamc
http://blog.linkedin.com/2012/06/06/linkedin-member-passwords-compromised/

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daave
> Members that have accounts associated with the compromised passwords will
> notice that their LinkedIn account password is no longer valid.

I wonder if they know how those particular hashes that were leaked got stolen,
if not, they should assume the whole database was stolen and only some of it
has been leaked publicly, thus necessitating that this action be taken for
_all_ users accounts, not just the ones that match the hashes in the leak.

> It is worth noting that the affected members who update their passwords and
> members whose passwords have not been compromised benefit from the enhanced
> security we just recently put in place, which includes hashing and salting
> of our current password databases.

Huh? For people who change their password, fine, but 'for members whose
passwords have not been compromised', how are they re-hashing them with salt
unless they have the original (plaintext) passwords on file. Or are they doing
H(salt + H(pass)), rather than H(salt + pass)?

If the latter, then hopefully they are at least re-hashing your password next
time you log in, but most people don't log in very often - my cookies
certainly haven't been expired. A co-worker tells me that even after changing
his password through the website, the login credentials on the Android app
were not expired!

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blantonl
What is most troubling about this post is that it appears that LinkedIn still
at this time doesn't know the attack vector.

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mjschultz
> members whose passwords have not been compromised benefit from the enhanced
> security we just recently put in place, which includes hashing and salting
> of our current password databases.

If we presume that the 6.5m password dump was the past version, it shows that
they just hashed the passwords before. This sentence (if I'm interpreting
correctly), indicates that they were plaintext and were recently changed from
plaintext to hash(salt+password).

I must be missing something in my interpretation though, because there isn't
any evidence that they had the plaintext passwords to begin with.

(My assumption is that he means any user that has recently logged in was
transparently moved to the hash(salt+password) scheme they are using now and
previously just had hash(password) in place.)

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unreal37
I don't interpret that as meaning any passwords were stored as plaintext. The
act of logging in caused them to create a new password hash that included a
salt, which was stored in the database (and presumably wiped out the old one.)

That all can be done without plaintext storage.

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mjschultz
Right, that's what my assumption is too but I didn't see anything in the post
that says "recently logged in users" or "once you log in you'll be protected
by the new scheme."

Just "members whose passwords have not been compromised benefit [from the new
scheme]".

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xtreme
I can't think of any reason not to salt passwords at this age.

~~~
jimktrains2
Or, you know, bcrypt or PBKDF2 or something...

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gshakir
LinkedIn should compensate the compromised accounts by giving them upgraded
accounts.

