[sho]

Why are you worried about how people with cameras could eventually brute force your password from that tiny, fuzzy smear of colour on the screen, when those same cameras can see your fingers typing the whole damn thing in, in plaintext?

[tptacek]

Because those cameras can see my screen easily, and not my fingers typing on the screen? Because my fingers aren't perpendicular to the floor? Because even if I was going to concede that the image of the SHA graph was going to be fuzzy, just getting the vicinity of the color reduces my search space by 1/2^(16..24)?

I love "cameras could eventually brute force" in your sentence, as if we were actually talking about some crazy hard feat of image analysis and cryptography, rather than running a dictionary through SHA1 and comparing colors.

Got any more arguments, sho?

[sho]

If someone is trying to learn your password from cameras nearby, they will make sure they can see your keyboard. Of course. If you're in that kind of hostile environment, nothing is safe except biometric or card authentication. Your concern is misplaced.

You should have raised the scenario of, say, spying on a screen through a window from the other side of the street. That's a much better example and in that one, you might actually have a point, although I understand it's against the rules in many organisations to allow a screen to face a window. But the "in the same building" one was ridiculous. Why bother brute forcing your squiggly coloured blotch when they can just put a tiny camera in every light, or whatever?

No, no further arguments. I agree it's a bad idea, of course.

[dfranke]

There are plenty of scenarios where someone would be watching you type your password through a camera, but doesn't control placement of the camera. The most common case would be a security guard who is paid to monitor the cameras but had no hand in the design of the surveillance system.

[sho]

I'm not saying it's a good idea, I'm saying that tptacek is overstating the risk compared to the far easier option of just spying on the keyboard.

And c'mon, no common security camera could pick up a usable copy of that little graph thing. Half the time they're not even colour. It would take specialised equipment. I was thinking more like thieves going to some rich person's house, finding a computer screen near a window, attaching a high-res camera and waiting for them to log on to internet banking, or something. Sure, in that situation, very bad risk. But geeze, if you're sitting in the Chinese embassy and logging on to the CIA web site using your fingers on a keyboard, tiny coloured graphs of your password hash are the least of your problems.

It is an interesting idea though. I don't like how much information is in the graph, but if it was reduced to just, say, a block of 16-bit colour, that might still be a useful hint to users. Probably more useful actually; the detailed graph is just confusing. And I don't think even tptacek would claim 16 bits of colour is much of a hint brute-forcing a 256 bit hash.

Taking that idea and running with it a little - you could even "salt" the colour randomly for each user, feeding the salt value into the JS. In fact, implementing a per-user salt for the system as proposed would eliminate all of tptacek's concerns. It wouldn't be the same across sites, but it would be consistent per site. I might suggest this as an improvement.

update: duh, the system wouldn't know which salt to load before the user logged in .. forget that idea. Unless it was stored in a cookie of course. Or could be loaded via AJAX when focus shifted out of the username field.

[tptacek]

Salts. The "Hitler" of computer security discussions.

[dfranke]

Nah, that'd be one-time pads.

[sho]

Yeah, yeah. I'm waiting to hear how you could conceivably brute force the password from that graph (and only that graph) if it had a random per-user salt.