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RE: [equinox-dev] Secure Storage Javadoc Gotchas
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HI Oleg,
thanks a lot again. It all looks great
:-)
For the Password Recovery Dialog that the user is
expected
to fill in, I'd propose adding a hint telling the user when
and
where he can actually run the password
recovery
("Note you can run password recovery from the Secure
Storage Preference Page").
And/Or add an F1 HelpContext to the
dialog.
Cheers,
--
Martin Oberhuber, Senior Member of Technical
Staff, Wind River
Target Management Project
Lead, DSDP PMC Member
Hi Martin,
Thank you, my pleasure.
> Runtime option for password: IMHO this is a
no-no because simple ps -ef on Linux will show the commandline that was used
for launching Eclipse, including the plaintext passwrd. It's one of the things
I've always disliked about the old Eclipse Keyring.
The way I imagine this is going to work is that
"-[eclipse.]password" will not normally be used. The normal everyday
functionality is covered by password providers; the option is only to be used
in situation where encryption of the data is not really important. It mostly
be used by scripts, tests, and such, not for normal everyday
processing.
> Password
recovery questions: When would those ever be used? Aren't these vulnerable to
Brute Force Dictionary attacks?
The preferences page has a "Recover password" button. If user forgets
the password (or if Windows module malfunctions, say due to the standalone
computer being re-installed without password recovery disk) then this option
could be used to recover password. It works slightly differently from a
conventional password recovery - the memory cache is populated but user is not
given the password directly, rather encouraged to change it.
To make it work we have two strings
("answers") provided by the user. We mush them up: "my street" and "1917"
becomes "m7y1 9s1treet" and then a crypto digest of the combo is created. This
process increases password strength even if original strings are dictionary
words. The password is encrypted with this mush up and stored in the secure
storage. (Of course, if answers are "a" and "1", no amount of processing is
going to improve password quality much :-).)
Creation of password recovery is optional. It has both
pluses and minuses:
"+" it adds
quite a bit of convenience;
"-"
as you say, it somewhat increases vulnerability of encrypted information to
dictionary-based attacks
I think
for a casual user "+" will outweigh the "-", but the important part is that it
is all optional.
> Password
Provider Priorities: shouldn't the user be able to move up / move down /
enable / disable password providers by Preference rather than just showing the
fixed priorities?
Good point. I'll see if we can add this
option in M7 (time permitting). There is a way to programmatically specify
preferred password provider via IProviderHints, but this might be useful
too.
Thanks,
Oleg
"Oberhuber, Martin"
<Martin.Oberhuber@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: equinox-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
04/02/2008 05:49 PM
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Subject
| RE: [equinox-dev] Secure Storage
Javadoc Gotchas |
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Hi Oleg,
thanks for all this information. Couple of
comments and further questions:
- Runtime option for password: IMHO
this is a no-no because simple ps -ef on Linux will show the commandline
that was used for launching Eclipse, including the plaintext passwrd. It's
one of the things I've always disliked about the old Eclipse Keyring.
- Runtime option for keyring location:
I've always liked this one because it allowed me to place my old Eclipse
keyring into an NTFS encrypted folder for added security, with rw access
only for my user id - an option that helps reducing the risk of "I copy your
keyring and apply brute force attacks to it" kinds of approaches.
- Password recovery questions: When
would those ever be used? Arent't these vulnerable to Brute Force Dictionary
attacks?
- Trusted bundles: sounds
interesting.
- Password Provider Priorities:
shouldn't the user be able to move up / move down / enable / disable
password providers by Preference rather than just showing the fixed
priorities?
- [question added by oleg]: that's a
bit of information which I actually found in the docs
;-)
Cheers,
--
Martin
Oberhuber, Senior Member of Technical Staff, Wind River
Target Management Project Lead, DSDP PMC Member
http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm
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