Portable Bitcoin Security, Backup & Privacy toolkit.

[RchGrav]

I believe I donated a little over a hundred. I wanted to help out the server as much as I could. I had no idea how much I was really giving you! Man, if I had those bitcoins again, I could finally buy myself the open pandora I've wanted for so many years! And then I found out that you already have that too! Why do you have everything I want!?

Would you twist that knife a little harder please.. 

I have the Pandora Console, Pandora Case, Stylus, Extra Battery, Battery Carrying Case, & AC Power Adapter, it works 100%, both nubs work perfectly, and it holds its charge forever (something like 10 hours of use).. I just put that stuff in the cart and it came to $624 shipped...

If you really still want one, but can't justify their asking price, you can take mine for 1/2 of that.

I'd be honored and happy if it went to you.

[thechevalier]

Yeah, I'm not real hot on Mt. Gox's Yubikeys, which costs like $30 and are only usable with Mt. Gox (my understanding; someone please correct me if I'm wrong). I'm not sure I actually trust Gox to implement multi-factor auth correctly, or any type of security (I don't like their new password hashing scheme, for example, which still seems lacking).

Yawn, for real though?!  I read about some script kiddie saying what they are doing isn't secure, so it must not be..

Back up your claims with some facts and figures son... you'll get more respect.

Woah, whoa... where's all this hostility coming from? I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, man.

My original MT.Gox password was "R8YC2txHc1RWtScewxid" and is listed in its MD5+Salt format in the hack DB as "$1$9W57ShSS$H37Nb7ik2PUf2WY/p/OEl.)"

Lets try that with a multi-iteration triple salt.. lets see what we get...(Honestly I don't know what that is, but I'll try, lol)

If you don't know what it is, why the eff are you defending it so vehemently?

Hopefully, what Mt. Gox is talking talking about is key stretching (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_strengthening), and hopefully they are doing more than just three iterations as in your example because that would hardly do anything to slow down a brute force or dictionary attack. Salts don't help against brute force attacks either, at all. Mt. Gox could add 50 salts and it wouldn't make a difference (unless maybe they stored the salts in another secure database or something). It's troubling they seem to have come up with their own homebrew system. Getting cryptography right is pretty hard and they should have used known good solutions instead of rolling their own thing.

mkpasswd -m sha-512 NbFEw6ToZrAnGai3kVDp1GbqY5iX7o0zu41iMelKnbjBvR/xUMAbxQ3Zk3egojw8GxXUlzGVTyCBT7NhKbLyE 86Ev9OHO/tSQ/NsH[/size]

Produces this output "$6$86Ev9OHO/tSQ/NsH$BBh.ljcEs8wqAWtpm1CAsoCpuAKXVPh8WJaTsr/H9o8uPXD9Qa5vDyHZkIhHWtoRSm.qLQkmJ7qXcDrsSbtJ90"

Yeah.. good luck with that.. even though its considered a speedier hash in comparison to bcrypt, its still 100% NON REVERSABLE, it has a HUGE output which is for all intents and purposes completely collisionless.  

I used Steve Gibsons "Password Haystacks" tool to do some sample calculations on what would be required to crack my current MT.Gox password.

<snip />

OMGWTFBBQ.. you are right.. My MT.Gox account is terribly terribly insecure.. what will I ever do now!?!?! Oh noes, and I gave away its length too!! I'm a goner!

Okay, you've constructed a straw animal here. We're not talking about your password, we're talking about passwords in general. Your password is a very good one. It seems to be 20 random alphanumeric chars. Most people -- almost nobody -- bothers to make a strong password like that. And Mt. Gox certainly doesn't force anyone to. They seem to have practically no password policy at all! You can still create a Mt. Gox account using a short dictionary word for a password. A good password policy would have accomplished way, way more to enhance their security than a bunch hand waving about "SHA-512 multi-iteration triple salted hashing".

Try cutting the length of your password in half and see what you get in Password Haystacks. Try cutting it down to seven characters.

For a few hundred bucks an hour you can spin up enough Amazon EC2 power to try hundreds of billions of passwords a second (i.e. Gibson's "Offline Fast Attack Scenario"). If the cracker can just use a dictionary attack to find passwords (like they probably can with Mt. Gox) s/he could probably use an old clunker PC to get those accounts.

SHA-512 is not "considered" faster than bcrypt, it is faster. SHA-512 was designed as a cryptographic primitive to be used as part of more complex crypto systems that need hashes for big chunks of data (e.g. documents, binary files) so it has to be very fast. There are even dedicated hardware implementations of it. Bcrypt on the other hand was designed for password hashing and does not have a fixed speed, so you can make brute force attacks infeasible. You can easily adjust the work factor to keep up with Moore's Law.

For $45 you can get two Yubikeys and a year's subscription to the LastPass service directly from Yubico:

https://store.yubico.com/store/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=13&osCsid=580ed7bb4272de9a5e6ad19b2b8c0166

That seems like a better way to go because you can use your key as a second factor with all the exchanges, and other sites as well. LastPass is a pretty good password vault too. Plus, you get two keys that can be programmed to be identical. You want a second Yubikey (or at least, I do) in case a key gets lost or damaged.

My Yubikey was free.

Yes, because you were affected by the hack, right? Everyone else hoping for a sloppy modicum of security has to pay $30.

While LastPass is a great password management service that can generate, store and automatically submit complex passwords for many sites, believing that this is a viable replacement for a site specific multi-factor authentication system is just flat out incorrect advice to give.  The fact that you are storing passwords in LastPass, and using the Yubikey to access them does not stop anyone from compromising any account if password has been compromised.  You understand the difference, right?  In your scenario the Yubikey is used as a secondary factor for LastPass.

Yes, I understand the difference. I guess what I meant to say is that I don't trust Mt. Gox to implement multi-factor auth correctly. You might be more secure using your own Yubikey and password manager, and trading on another exchange that takes security more seriously.

You are just repeating what you think is true .. because thats what someone else wrote.

False.

How would the attacker be able to mount an attack by getting access to both my ironkey & yubikey? (The other drive you see is empty, its a tool.)  Did you just make that up hoping no one would call you on it?  The $5 wrench attack would NEVER work as an attack vector against the Yubikey or Ironkey.. HOW!?! The ONLY way he would get any of my Bitcoins would be if my car was broken down, and he used the wrench to help get it going, I would give him a few coin, and say THANKS!!

How about: first an attacker hits you with a wrench to get the password to your Mt. Gox account, then she hits you again to get the password to your IronKey, then she takes all your Bitcoinage! Seems like it would work to me. BTW, do you memorize your 20-char random Mt. Gox password? Or do you use a password manager or write it down or something?

Question..  Have you actually attempted using TrueCrypt as a roaming data security solution for any period of time with any level of convienience?  

Yeah, I have -- for years. It works great.

You do realize that a truecrypt drive is pretty easy to get into, right?...

I use a Truecrypt container not a drive. But anyway, that's false.

Do you truely believe that sprinkling your wallet.dat all over the interwebs might just be the best approach to keeping your wallet.dat available and secure?. If any one of those files gets uncovered and decrypted you might find that those efforts were all in vain.  Remember the bitcoin community has a higher level of knowledge & capability in that area.

Yes, I think it's a good approach. I don't think either of those things is likely at all.

What implementations of paper based storage of bitcoins have you explored?  What is wrong with paperback?  I found it to have high levels of resilience against damage, highly recoverable, and additionally it was configurable with strong FIPS-197 compliant AES encryption via a configurable password.  Check it out (http://www.ollydbg.de/Paperbak/index.html) or does this not live up to your security standards either!?!   Here is a nice sample to print and scan back in.. the password is "bitcoin"  http://www.mediafire.com/?yks2s9251yfvywy

The only paper-based ones I've looked at print out the private keys to your bitcoins in the clear or as QR codes. I wasn't aware of Paperback. It looks good. I'll definitely take a close look. Thanks for the tip.

Well anyway... If you think I'm wrong you can tell me again.. I really don't mind, it helps me learn.  

No, I don't think you're wrong. Ironkey looks like a great product. I just don't trust Mt. Gox's security and I'm not sure I'd personally want to become dependent on an expensive flash drive, especially when there are free tools that are just as (if not more) secure.

[RchGrav]

If you don't know what it is, why the eff are you defending it so vehemently?

Try cutting the length of your password in half and see what you get in Password Haystacks. Try cutting it down to seven characters.

How about: first an attacker hits you with a wrench to get the password to your Mt. Gox account, then she hits you again to get the password to your IronKey, then she takes all your Bitcoinage! Seems like it would work to me. BTW, do you memorize your 20-char random Mt. Gox password? Or do you use a password manager or write it down or something?


I just don't trust Mt. Gox's security and I'm not sure I'd personally want to become dependent on an expensive flash drive, especially when there are free tools that are just as (if not more) secure.

No hostility, nor feelings hurt... only the feelings of reality were hurt.

I wasn't aware that they didn't have any password policies in place, but . I see them doing a decent job lately.  If it happens again.. well now.. thats a different story.  I have adjusted my trading habits since the attack... at no time will I keep more money in ANY account than I am unable to withdraw in one shot.  I feel more comfortable with someone I already know well, than dealing with unknowns.

Truecrypt is susceptible to a memory dump attack.. whether container or drive, it doesn't matter.  I think truecrypt is a decent solution, and I have had experience with it all the way back to its roots in the scramdisk... The biggest killer for me is the inability to use it on a computer that is properly secured without specific preinstallation of truecrypt by a system administrator.  These were real stumbling blocks I found when implementing it for a government agency in a secure network...  On the first day of the trial the fact that you couldn't mount the data on secured computers was the final nail in the coffin, the memory dump attacks is an interesting sidenote.  This experience is what causes me to call into the question its usefulness and convenience when roaming outside of your realm of administration.

The Kingston Locker+ thumb drive seems to be an actual viable equivalent to Ironkeys if you don't require access from a linux computer.

In the past week I have used my Ironkey on Windows 7 (64) and XP (32), Mac OS/X Leopard (32) & Snow Leopard (64), and 2 linux installs (32 & 64), which total 6 distict platforms.  I was able to do this without any complicated preplanned configuration by just inserting the drive and double clicking an icon.

The wrench attack is far fetched.. and the likelihood of its occurrence is low.. Its much more likely that small devices like this could be misplaced.  Worrying about women who carry wrenches as being a serious security vector, is like worrying that the Coyote from road runner will spike my cola with earthquake pills.... much more likely to happen in a comic strip than real life.

I greatly simplified my password example to "123.Bitcoin.456" and assuming it was attacked at the rate of 100,000,000,000,000 guesses per second, it would still take nearly 1.5 million centuries to perform an exhaustive search, a secure password does not preclude the ability to be memorized.

I guess security is in the eye of the beholder.

[thechevalier]

If you don't know what it is, why the eff are you defending it so vehemently?

Try cutting the length of your password in half and see what you get in Password Haystacks. Try cutting it down to seven characters.

How about: first an attacker hits you with a wrench to get the password to your Mt. Gox account, then she hits you again to get the password to your IronKey, then she takes all your Bitcoinage! Seems like it would work to me. BTW, do you memorize your 20-char random Mt. Gox password? Or do you use a password manager or write it down or something?

I just don't trust Mt. Gox's security and I'm not sure I'd personally want to become dependent on an expensive flash drive, especially when there are free tools that are just as (if not more) secure.

I wasn't aware that they didn't have any password policies in place, but . I see them doing a decent job lately.  If it happens again.. well now.. thats a different story.

No, actually they aren't; I made an account the other day as a test with the word "feline" for a password (!). My guess is they will be hacked again. They haven't talked about having an audit done for additional SQL injection vulnerabilities, have they?

Truecrypt is susceptible to a memory dump attack.. whether container or drive, it doesn't matter.

So is the data on your IronKey once you start using it.

I think truecrypt is a decent solution, and I have had experience with it all the way back to its roots in the scramdisk... The biggest killer for me is the inability to use it on a computer that is properly secured without specific preinstallation of truecrypt by a system administrator.

Yeah, well, if you're really security conscious, you 1) shouldn't use Windows and 2) shouldn't use any machine you don't have admin rights to.

But I agree that is a nice feature the IronKey has over TrueCrypt.

The wrench attack is far fetched.. and the likelihood of its occurrence is low.. Its much more likely that small devices like this could be misplaced.

Yes, it is, for now, but as crypto-money gets more popular and widely used and understood, the $5 wrench attack becomes more likely. I predict we'll see it happen.

I greatly simplified my password example to "123.Bitcoin.456" and assuming it was attacked at the rate of 100,000,000,000,000 guesses per second, it would still take nearly 1.5 million centuries to perform an exhaustive search, a secure password does not preclude the ability to be memorized.
[/qoute]

Okay, so you have reduced it to 15 characters. That's a good length for a password (for now). Congratulations, you're safe from brute-force keyspace searching. (Again, most people don't bother to make a password that long so this doesn't have anything to do with Mt. Gox's secruity.) However, that particular password is actually relatively weak because it's very susceptible to a dictionary attack. I'd guess it'd probably take more like 1.5 hours than 1.5 million centuries to crack.

[RchGrav]

If you don't know what it is, why the eff are you defending it so vehemently?

Try cutting the length of your password in half and see what you get in Password Haystacks. Try cutting it down to seven characters.

How about: first an attacker hits you with a wrench to get the password to your Mt. Gox account, then she hits you again to get the password to your IronKey, then she takes all your Bitcoinage! Seems like it would work to me. BTW, do you memorize your 20-char random Mt. Gox password? Or do you use a password manager or write it down or something?

I just don't trust Mt. Gox's security and I'm not sure I'd personally want to become dependent on an expensive flash drive, especially when there are free tools that are just as (if not more) secure.

I wasn't aware that they didn't have any password policies in place, but . I see them doing a decent job lately.  If it happens again.. well now.. thats a different story.

No, actually they aren't; I made an account the other day as a test with the word "feline" for a password (!). My guess is they will be hacked again. They haven't talked about having an audit done for additional SQL injection vulnerabilities, have they?

Truecrypt is susceptible to a memory dump attack.. whether container or drive, it doesn't matter.

So is the data on your IronKey once you start using it.

I think truecrypt is a decent solution, and I have had experience with it all the way back to its roots in the scramdisk... The biggest killer for me is the inability to use it on a computer that is properly secured without specific preinstallation of truecrypt by a system administrator.

Yeah, well, if you're really security conscious, you 1) shouldn't use Windows and 2) shouldn't use any machine you don't have admin rights to.

But I agree that is a nice feature the IronKey has over TrueCrypt.

The wrench attack is far fetched.. and the likelihood of its occurrence is low.. Its much more likely that small devices like this could be misplaced.

Yes, it is, for now, but as crypto-money gets more popular and widely used and understood, the $5 wrench attack becomes more likely. I predict we'll see it happen.

I greatly simplified my password example to "123.Bitcoin.456" and assuming it was attacked at the rate of 100,000,000,000,000 guesses per second, it would still take nearly 1.5 million centuries to perform an exhaustive search, a secure password does not preclude the ability to be memorized.
[/qoute]

Okay, so you have reduced it to 15 characters. That's a good length for a password (for now). Congratulations, you're safe from brute-force keyspace searching. (Again, most people don't bother to make a password that long so this doesn't have anything to do with Mt. Gox's secruity.) However, that particular password is actually relatively weak because it's very susceptible to a dictionary attack. I'd guess it'd probably take more like 1.5 hours than 1.5 million centuries to crack.

Thats kind of the point, 123.Bitcoin.456, is NOT vulnerable to a dictionary attack... since its padded..  I'll concede that 1.5 million centuries was to perform an exhaustive search of the whole character space that password occupies, but since the password begins with the "1" character, you could divide 1.5 million centuries by the 95 which represents the number of character alphabet you would need to search, and you are down to (approximately) 150,000 Centuries... but that still assumes you would be brute forcing the password at 100trillion guesses per second.  100 trillion guesses per second would require a distributed attack of 10x the size of the total computational power of the bitcoin network as it stands today. 1.5 hours. well.. come on. do you believe that?  You do understand that to perform a "Dictionary Attack" that the exact string "123.Bitcoin.456" would have to pre-exist in the dictionary you are using to brute force with, substrings are useless...   I'm not sure Moore's Law still even applies in todays world, but if it does, it would still take 500 years for technology to be 150,000 times more powerful than it is today.. and that still would take that massive password cracking array a whole century... The user of that password would be DEAD before it is cracked. 

As far as the comments on having the data unencrypted in memory once any storage device is unlocked.. yes, of course, there is absolutely no way to avoid something that is software from being present in your computers memory.. thats the risk no matter what.  I was referring to the encryption keys that secure the data itself inside of the truecrypt container.  Whats really cool about the Ironkey, is the fact that the encryption keys are located in hardware, and the application that accepts the password, communicates directly to that chip.. the password you enter, the encryption keys, etc. Never enter the system ram, can never be copied into the hibernation file, or page/swap files of the computer you are using.  A lost ironkey can't even have its data copied in the encrypted form from the drive... its safe. The comment that truecrypt is just as secure, if not more secure is just wrong.  I hope you see that. Its very secure, but just as secure... or more secure isn't correct.

Of course Windows isn't secure, lol.. especially when it has been used by people who are not security aware..  and sometimes not even secure when used by those kind of people... Windows is a toy.  Doesn't mean I don't use it... but I also have specific computers for specific purposes.  A couple linux systems and a couple of macs...  I tend not to discriminate...

I 100% agree with your comments of the safest computers are those you administer.. but the fact remains that there will be times it is nice to just hop on a computer and send some bitcoins and do some trades... as safely as possible... The safest way would be the Live BootCD techniques mentioned by other posts..  Another smart thing would be to not put all of your eggs in one basket, especially with bitcoins.

Hey... I hope you aren't taking any of this personal.. I just enjoy having these kind of technology / security discussions, as I'm sure you do too..