[Cryptography] Passwords (Smallest feasible work factor today?)

[Ray Dillinger]

On 9/8/22 18:17, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
>
> I have over 500 stored passwords. What sort of cretin would imagine 
> that I would possibly remember 500 different ones? Someone would have 
> to be a special type of stupid with extra stupid sauce to believe 
> anyone could do that.

I use a metal lockbox full of 3x5 cards as my password manager. And when 
asked, I recommend it. The system architecture is visible, verifiable, 
reliable, easy to understand and correctly operate, hard to remotely 
subvert or hack, and easy to check with absolute confidence for malware 
or spyware regardless of whether you trust the hardware manufacturer.  
The security model does have one big hole if someone else gets their 
hands on the box. But if someone has to resort to in-person burglary to 
get at passwords - meaning personal attention for an individual target - 
It's not compatible with the economic model of most people who'd be 
after most passwords.

But recently I've felt the need of better; probably paranoia on my part 
but I'm working on something that really and truly can't get out.

So for a few "special" passwords I invested the effort to make my "too 
low tech to hack" approach one level harder, closing the "somebody gets 
their hands on it" hole fairly tight; The passwords stored on my 3x5 
cards in the metal lockbox for these "special" passwords are plaintext 
that I pass through a pencil-and-paper encryption to get the actual 
password.  And there are a few ordinary things I carry with me which I 
use in combination as the key to that pencil-and-paper cipher.  But 
nobody looking through my stuff would ever see a key there, nor know how 
to combine these objects to make the key, nor know how to use it as a key.

So for most passwords, there's an annoying fifteen second lookup.  For 
the "special" ones there's a fifteen-second lookup plus about a minute 
and a half of hand encrypting to work out the real password.

This is annoying and high-effort compared to the neat package most 
hardware password managers present.  But the electronic password manager 
does not exist whose every hardware component is made by people whom I 
implicitly trust or whose every circuit trace can be visually checked at 
any time to make sure that it's exactly what it ought to be.  Nor does 
the electronic password manager exist whose every line of code is 
guaranteed not to be exploitable.

Seriously.  If you want password security, consider the metal box with a 
lock.  It has virtues hard to match on most electronic platforms.

                 Bear

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