Larion Studios forum stores your passwords in unhashed plaintext. Don’t use a password there that you’ve used anywhere else.
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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.
But
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.
It is still a bad idea to send the password in plaintext via email. You never know when Bard will peek a look and then share your password along users as a demo account to try that forum.
Nobody suggested otherwise.
You should always change your password from the system generated one to prevent that from happening. The app that you signed up for should enforce that by making you change your password when you log in.
It’s not a system generated one they sent, it was user generated.
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?
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
This is a friendly reminder to everyone that password managers are not risk free either. LastPass was hacked last year, NortonLifeLock earlier this year.
Personally the risk of bitwarden is outweighed by its convenience (compared to self hosted/local only solutions) in my opinion, but I know that’ll change real quick if bitwarden ever has a breach. If it does I’m jumping ship to a self hosted or local only solution, but I’m hoping that doesn’t have to happen
Bitwarden is end to end encrypted. If the host gets hacked your passwords are still as safe as your master password is. Self hosting wouldn’t really be a huge help there. Possibly even detrimental depending on your level of competence at securing a public facing web host.
I heard people’s LastPass accounts were getting compromised after that theft, but I also don’t know how strong their master passwords were.
This is why I don’t use a common centralized password manager, just like I don’t use any of the most popular remote desktop solutions like TeamViewer for unattended access.
I run a consumer copy of Pleasant Password Manager out of AWS and use NoMachine for unattended access to any machines where I need it.
Security through obscurity is tried and true. Put as little of your security attack surface in the hands of others as is reasonable.
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.…and if they keep the emails they send out archived (which would be reasonable), they also have it stored in plaintext there.
Automatically generated emails usually don’t get saved.
As the designated email dev at my company I can confidently say this is not true.
Not saying that this specific email is persisted, but almost all that I work with are. It’s a very common practice.
Yeah, we save most emails sent out at my work.
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 nowadaysGenerated emails usually don’t get saved, as soon as it is delivered it will be gone.
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…)
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.
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.hashing on client side is considered a bad idea and almost never done.
you actually send your password “in plain text” every time you sign up.Really everytime you log in too.
Of course. You receive the password in plain on account creation, do the process you need, and then store it hashed.
That’s fine and normal
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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.
What an absolutely shitty design.
I had a similar situation with my health insurance company, except I think they added the character limit a while after I had set my password T_T. So, it worked for months, then they changed the mobile app so I couldn’t enter a long password… And then eventually they changed the website too and then I couldn’t log in at all. Thaaaaanks.
Doesnt lemmy also do it? I think I ve heard from Ruben at Boostforlemmy that lemmy only treats first 60 characters of your password as a password and the rest gets discarded. [citation needed]
Can’t say I’ve ever tried to use a password quite that long, so I’m not sure.
Not ideal, but trimming it (especially when you’re keeping 60 chars) isn’t the end of the world. It was just super confusing that the web app doesn’t trim it during login as well. There’s no indication that your password was modified or what you’ve entered to login is too long. Just ‘incorrect user/pass’ despite entering what you’ve just set. That char limit for my bank is only 16 chars, so it’s easy to hit.
It’s a big deal IMO, particularly because at login it doesn’t do the same. From the user perspective, your password has effectively been modified without your knowledge and no reasonable way of finding out. Good luck getting access to your account.
When a bank does this it should be considered gross negligence.
Kind of.
The official web UI doesn’t let you enter more than 60 characters, but doesn’t indicate that at all. So you can keep typing past 60 characters but it won’t get added to the input field and you can’t really see that. If you paste a password into the field, it gets trimmed to 60 characters.
When creating a password, the server checks that it isn’t longer than 60 characters and returns an error if so. On login, however, it silently trims the password to 72 bytes, because that’s what the hashing algorithm they use supports.
Isn’t this also what Windows NT used to do? I feel like I remember encountering this scenario
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.
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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.
Would you accept “in a way that can be reversed”?
Passwords shouldn’t be stored at all though 🤷♂️
You mean plaintext passwords right? Ofcourse then need to store your (hashed)password!
The hash is not the password.
My bad! I just misunderstood >.<
If they stored the hashed password this thread wouldn’t exist.
Point is, a hash isn’t a password. giving the most you don’t need tech knowledge analogy, it’s like the passwords fingerprint.
The police station may keep your daughters fingerprint so that if they find a lost child they can recognize it is your daughter beyond any doubt. Your daughters fingerprints, is like a hash, your daughter is a password.
The police should not store your daughter… that’s bad practice. The fingerprints are all they should store, and needless to say the fingerprints aren’t your daughter, just as a hash isn’t a password.
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
For those who haven’t made accounts yet, you don’t actually have to make an account to play Larian Studios games.
