Password hash funciton

[mbrooks-stachliu]

There is a vulnerability related to how passwords are stored. It is referred to as CWE-916: Use of Password Hash With Insufficient Computational Effort:
http://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/916.html

On line 59 the generate_password_hash() method is used without specifying a password hash function:
https://github.com/scotch/engineauth/blob/master/engineauth/strategies/password.py

This will default to sha1:
http://webapp-improved.appspot.com/_modules/webapp2_extras/security.html#generate_password_hash

hashlib supports sha256, which is better than sha1 for passwords, however still not suitable. Ideally you want to a heavy KDF funciton such as bcrypt or scrypt.

This is a good read on bcrypt for passwords:
http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/4781/do-any-security-experts-recommend-bcrypt-for-password-storage/6415

I will also file bug with webapp2.

[kylefinley]

@mbrooks-stachliu,

Sorry of the late response.

Your absolutely right; EngineAuth should be using a more secure strategy. It's been some time since I've look into it but at the time bcrypt, scrypt were not included in the python app engine environment and a pure python implementation woud be to processor-intensive to be useful.

According the this answer PBKDF2 or SHA-512-Crypt might be a viable solution.

Would you be interested in working on this?

[mbrooks-stachliu]

Conceptually this is a pretty easy fix. It is just a drop in replacement of a function call. However it should be noted that this version is not backwards compatible with previous versions.

Also use bcrypt, I think that’s the best of the three.

From: Kyle Finley [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, June 14, 2013 1:19 PM
To: scotch/engineauth
Cc: Michael Brooks
Subject: Re: [engineauth] Password hash funciton (#13)

@mbrooks-stachliuhttps://github.com/mbrooks-stachliu,

Sorry of the late response.

Your absolutely right; EngineAuth should be using a more secure strategy. It's been some time since I've look into it but at the time bcrypt, scrypt were not included in the python app engine environment and a pure python implementation woud be to processor-intensive to be useful.

According the this answerhttp://stackoverflow.com/a/7029369/236564 PBKDF2 or SHA-512-Crypt might be a viable solution.

Would you be interested in working on this?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/13#issuecomment-19479334.