Hackers and Autism

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Joined: 23 Mar 2012
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04 Oct 2012, 4:27 pm

Did you want to be a hacker or are you a hacker? I used to hack when I was younger but had a mentor get me out of it. I now study math but I still find hacking fascinating.

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INTJ

Cornflake
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04 Oct 2012, 4:42 pm

[Moved from General Autism Discussion to Computers, Math, Science, and Technology]

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JockGitJnr
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04 Oct 2012, 4:53 pm

When I was younger I thought it would be cool to become a hacker but as I have grown up I am quite the opposite. I am fascinated with high level security. I think gaining access to any persons personal information is wrong and I wouldn't like it to happen to me. Even when I am on another persons computer I am always asking if I am allowed in to certain folders just in case they have something in there they don't want me to see. Security wise I have Encrypted partitions, a separate browser that uses a proxy and doesn't allow any scripts and when I get a laptop I shall add the need for a system start up USB stick that if it isn't in the machine then the machine will not turn on.

According to this website http://howsecureismypassword.net/ it would take 88 nonillion years for an average desktop PC to guess one of my many passwords

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LookTwice
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04 Oct 2012, 5:33 pm

JockGitJnr wrote:

According to this website http://howsecureismypassword.net/ it would take 88 nonillion years for an average desktop PC to guess one of my many passwords

That time just got lowered to 0.0 ms by entering your password on an unknown third-party website.

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JockGitJnr
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04 Oct 2012, 5:44 pm

LookTwice wrote:

That time just got lowered to 0.0 ms by entering your password on an unknown third-party website.

The site source shows that no information is sent anywhere and they would also need to know a username to work out what account the password is linked to.

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What our ancestors would really be thinking, if they were alive today, is: "Why is it so dark in here?" - Sir Terry Pratchett

Colinn
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04 Oct 2012, 7:52 pm

Ethical hacking would definitely be a better way to go. Figuring out exploits and how they can be fixed. Much more of a productive practice than using these skills for fraudulent uses.

sliqua-jcooter
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04 Oct 2012, 8:17 pm

JockGitJnr wrote:

Yawn. Depending on the encryption type, most whole-disk encryption schemes that don't cost $$$$$ can be broken in a little over a day for a couple hundred bucks - your browser with proxy can pretty easily be hijacked or MITM'd, and any way you can come up with to only let a laptop boot with a USB key in it can be bypassed.

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2fefd8
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04 Oct 2012, 8:33 pm

JockGitJnr wrote:

LookTwice wrote:

That time just got lowered to 0.0 ms by entering your password on an unknown third-party website.

The site source shows that no information is sent anywhere and they would also need to know a username to work out what account the password is linked to.

There are ways of doing this. For example, if an attacker stole the password file (which contains a hash of each password) they could match your username to the hash calculated from the password you provided. The point is that it's a bad idea to provide your password to untrusted third-party websites.

sliqua-jcooter wrote:

I'm not sure what you are talking about. There are FOSS whole disk encryption systems which are very secure. Reference?

sliqua-jcooter
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04 Oct 2012, 8:36 pm

Quote:

sliqua-jcooter wrote:

I'm not sure what you are talking about. There are FOSS whole disk encryption systems which are very secure. Reference?

I spun up 10* EC2 GPU instances and brute forced the LUKS key on my file server - it took 61 hours.

EDIT: Typo'd - it was 10 instances, not 100

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2fefd8
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04 Oct 2012, 10:03 pm

sliqua-jcooter wrote:

Quote:

sliqua-jcooter wrote:

I'm not sure what you are talking about. There are FOSS whole disk encryption systems which are very secure. Reference?

I spun up 10* EC2 GPU instances and brute forced the LUKS key on my file server - it took 61 hours.

EDIT: Typo'd - it was 10 instances, not 100

It must use pretty weak encryption for that to be possible but there are better systems that use AES (which you wouldn't be able to brute force).

sliqua-jcooter
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04 Oct 2012, 10:09 pm

No, LUKS is fairly decent - but 20 M2050's is a pretty formidable amount of processing power.

And it doesn't matter what kind of key gets generated - the passphrase is always brute forceable

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2fefd8
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04 Oct 2012, 10:23 pm

sliqua-jcooter wrote:

No, LUKS is fairly decent - but 20 M2050's is a pretty formidable amount of processing power.

And it doesn't matter what kind of key gets generated - the passphrase is always brute forceable

Well, something is wrong. Either the encryption is weak or the key is too short. You can't break strong encryption by brute force when it's done correctly. AES cannot be broken by brute force even using modern supercomputers so there's no way you could crack it using a few amazon EC2 instances.

Last edited by 2fefd8 on 04 Oct 2012, 10:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

sliqua-jcooter
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04 Oct 2012, 10:25 pm

2fefd8 wrote:

sliqua-jcooter wrote:

No, LUKS is fairly decent - but 20 M2050's is a pretty formidable amount of processing power.

And it doesn't matter what kind of key gets generated - the passphrase is always brute forceable

Well, something is wrong. Either the encryption is weak or the key is too short. You can't break strong encryption by brute force when it's done correctly.

You can *always* brute force something, it's just a question of how long it takes.

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2fefd8
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04 Oct 2012, 10:27 pm

sliqua-jcooter wrote:

2fefd8 wrote:

sliqua-jcooter wrote:

No, LUKS is fairly decent - but 20 M2050's is a pretty formidable amount of processing power.

And it doesn't matter what kind of key gets generated - the passphrase is always brute forceable

Well, something is wrong. Either the encryption is weak or the key is too short. You can't break strong encryption by brute force when it's done correctly.

You can *always* brute force something, it's just a question of how long it takes.

Obviously! But if it takes many years on the world's most powerful supercomputers it doesn't really count.

sliqua-jcooter
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04 Oct 2012, 10:31 pm

The days of the worlds most powerful supercomputers not being able to brute force something for years are long gone.

On any symmetric passphrase-based system (which is what the vast majority of disk encryption systems use), the strength of the encryption isn't the key, but rather the entropy of the passphrase. You can have a 512-bit 3AES key, but if you only have a passphrase with 32 bits of entropy, then you're pretty much screwed.

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2fefd8
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04 Oct 2012, 10:39 pm

sliqua-jcooter wrote:

The days of the worlds most powerful supercomputers not being able to brute force something for years are long gone.

This is completely false. There are plenty of problems which are still not tractable even for supercomputers. You can't brute force AES256 even with a supercomputer since it requires a search over a space of size 2^256 (yes, I know that AES lost two bits recently but that doesn't matter much here).

sliqua-jcooter wrote:

On any symmetric passphrase-based system (which is what the vast majority of disk encryption systems use), the strength of the encryption isn't the key, but rather the entropy of the passphrase. You can have a 512-bit 3AES key, but if you only have a passphrase with 32 bits of entropy, then you're pretty much screwed.

So what? I said assuming it's done properly which would rule out weak passphrases.

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