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Once a user has logged into FaceTime, anyone with access to the machine can change the user’s Apple ID password without knowing the old password.
Of course, it’s just as easy to change it back, if the victim notices.
EDITED TO ADD (11/9): It’s been fixed.
“Smudge Attacks on Smartphone Touch Screens“:
Abstract: Touch screens are an increasingly common feature on personal computing devices, especially smartphones, where size and user interface advantages accrue from consolidating multiple hardware components (keyboard, number pad, etc.) into a single software definable user interface. Oily residues, or smudges, on the touch screen surface, are one side effect of touches from which frequently used patterns such as a graphical password might be inferred.
In this paper we examine the feasibility of such smudge attacks on touch screens for smartphones, and focus our analysis on the Android password pattern. We first investigate the conditions (e.g., lighting and camera orientation) under which smudges are easily extracted. In the vast majority of settings, partial or complete patterns are easily retrieved. We also emulate usage situations that interfere with pattern identification, and show that pattern smudges continue to be recognizable. Finally, we provide a preliminary analysis of applying the information learned in a smudge attack to guessing an Android password pattern.
Reminds me of similar attacks on alarm and lock keypads.
It’s a service:
The mechanism used involves captured network traffic, which is uploaded to the WPA Cracker service and subjected to an intensive brute force cracking effort. As advertised on the site, what would be a five-day task on a dual-core PC is reduced to a job of about twenty minutes on average. For the more “premium” price of $35, you can get the job done in about half the time. Because it is a dictionary attack using a predefined 135-million-word list, there is no guarantee that you will crack the WPA key, but such an extensive dictionary attack should be sufficient for any but the most specialized penetration testing purposes.
[…]
It gets even better. If you try the standard 135-million-word dictionary and do not crack the WPA encryption on your target network, there is an extended dictionary that contains an additional 284 million words. In short, serious brute force wireless network encryption cracking has become a retail commodity.
FAQ here.
In related news, there might be a man-in-the-middle attack possible against the WPA2 protocol. Man-in-the-middle attacks are potentially serious, but it depends on the details—and they’re not available yet.
EDITED TO ADD (8/8): Details about the MITM attack.
Two interesting research papers on website password policies.
“Where Do Security Policies Come From?“:
Abstract: We examine the password policies of 75 different websites. Our goal is understand the enormous diversity of requirements: some will accept simple six-character passwords, while others impose rules of great complexity on their users. We compare different features of the sites to find which characteristics are correlated with stronger policies. Our results are surprising: greater security demands do not appear to be a factor. The size of the site, the number of users, the value of the assets protected and the frequency of attacks show no correlation with strength. In fact we find the reverse: some of the largest, most attacked sites with greatest assets allow relatively weak passwords. Instead, we find that those sites that accept advertising, purchase sponsored links and where the user has a choice show strong inverse correlation with strength.
We conclude that the sites with the most restrictive password policies do not have greater security concerns, they are simply better insulated from the consequences of poor usability. Online retailers and sites that sell advertising must compete vigorously for users and traffic. In contrast to government and university sites, poor usability is a luxury they cannot afford. This in turn suggests that much of the extra strength demanded by the more restrictive policies is superfluous: it causes considerable inconvenience for negligible security improvement.
The Password Thicket: Technical and Market Failures in Human Authentication on the Web:
Abstract: We report the results of the first large-scale empirical analysis of password implementations deployed on the Internet. Our study included 150 websites which offer free user accounts for a variety of purposes, including the most popular destinations on the web and a random sample of e-commerce, news, and communication websites. Although all sites evaluated relied on user-chosen textual passwords for authentication, we found many subtle but important technical variations in implementation with important security implications. Many poor practices were commonplace, such as a lack of encryption to protect transmitted passwords, storage of cleartext passwords in server databases, and little protection of passwords from brute force attacks. While a spectrum of implementation quality exists with a general correlation between implementation choices within more-secure and less-secure websites, we find a surprising number of inconsistent choices within individual sites, suggesting that the lack of a standards is harming security. We observe numerous ways in which the technical failures of lower-security sites can compromise higher-security sites due to the well-established tendency of users to re-use passwords. Our data confirms that the worst security practices are indeed found at sites with few security incentives, such as newspaper websites, while sites storing more sensitive information such as payment details or user communication implement more password security. From an economic viewpoint, password insecurity is a negative externality that the market has been unable to correct, undermining the viability of password-based authentication. We also speculate that some sites deploying passwords do so primarily for psychological reasons, both as a justification for collecting marketing data and as a way to build trusted relationships with customers. This theory suggests that efforts to replace passwords with more secure protocols or federated identity systems may fail because they don’t recreate the entrenched ritual of password authentication.
EDITED TO ADD (8/7): Four blog posts by the authors of the second paper.
It’s easy to access someone else’s voicemail by spoofing the caller ID. This isn’t new; what is new is that many people now have easy access to caller ID spoofing.
The spoofing only works for voicemail accounts that don’t have a password set up, but AT&T has no password as the default.
By Russian spies:
Ricci said the steganographic program was activated by pressing control-alt-E and then typing in a 27-character password, which the FBI found written down on a piece of paper during one of its searches.
EDITED TO ADD (7/2): More information.
It can happen to anyone:
Here’s how I got fooled. On Monday, I unlocked my Nexus One phone, installing a new and more powerful version of the Android operating system that allowed me to do some neat tricks, like using the phone as a wireless modem on my laptop. In the process of reinstallation, I deleted all my stored passwords from the phone. I also had a couple of editorials come out that day, and did a couple of interviews, and generally emitted a pretty fair whack of information.
The next day, Tuesday, we were ten minutes late getting out of the house. My wife and I dropped my daughter off at the daycare, then hurried to our regular coffee shop to get take-outs before parting ways to go to our respective offices. Because we were a little late arriving, the line was longer than usual. My wife went off to read the free newspapers, I stood in the line. Bored, I opened up my phone fired up my freshly reinstalled Twitter client and saw that I had a direct message from an old friend in Seattle, someone I know through fandom. The message read “Is this you????”? and was followed by one of those ubiquitous shortened URLs that consist of a domain and a short code, like this: http://owl.ly/iuefuew.
The whole story is worth reading.
WiFi cracking kits are being sold in China.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.