Basic cyber security says that passwords should be encrypted and hashed, so that even the company storing them doesn’t know what the password is. (When you log in, the site performs the same encrypting and hashing steps and compares the results) Otherwise if they are hacked, the attackers get access to all the passwords.
I’ve noticed a few companies ask for specific characters of my password to prove who I am (eg enter the 2nd and 9th character)
Is there any secure way that this could be happening? Or are the companies storing my password in plain text?
They could hash pairs of characters on password creation and store those. Seems like more data points to guess the original password, but maybe the math is hard enough it doesn’t do much.
If it’s uniquely salted (and especially if they use a secret pepper too) it might not help with guessing the password, because now you have to crack several hashes of long random sequences of bytes instead of just one.
I’m finding it hard to see how it would be more secure. If I understand what the other comment meant, they would have something like:
password123 = ef92b778bafe771e89245b89ecbc08a44a4e166c06659911881f383d4473e94fWe’ll assume they pick 4 random pairs
3rd + 5th (sw) = 7865b7e6b9d241d744d330eec3b3a0fe4f9d36af75d96291638504680f805bfd 9th + 11th (13) = 3fdba35f04dc8c462986c992bcf875546257113072a909c162f7e470e581e278 2nd + 5th (aw) = f5fe88ee08735ae259265495a93c8de2b0eacfecf0cd90b5821479be3199fa8c 6th + 8th (od) = 32f30ea0e83c41a331c4330213005568675f7542c25f354ebb634db78cc30d12Assuming all 128 7bit character options are used and ignoring dictionary or optimized attacks the complexity of the full password is 7x11 or 77 bits (or 151,115,727,451,828,646,838,272 combinations). So with just the password hash that’s how many tries you need to exhaust every possible option, again without optimizing the process.
But for each of the pairs the complexity is 14 bits or 16,384 combinations. So it would take microseconds to crack all 4 of the pairs. With that information you’d get a password of ?as?wo?d1?3??? (because we don’t know the length) and if they have used a common word or series of words you might have enough information to guess the rest, but even when brute forcing you’ve removed a decent amount of complexity.
Note: This is SHA256. We’re going to ignore salt for this. Salt only increases complexity because you need to crack each user’s password and not able to really use rainbow tables etc.
Unless I misunderstood the idea. In which case, sorry about that.
In all likelihood it is encrypted in a database and the interface to the phone operator only allows them to enter what is said and confirm (although I wouldn’t be surprised of some showing the whole password).