> 46.6% of deployments use weaker-than-OWASP parameters.
Sounds like a job for better default parameter values.
I'm willing to bet most startups just install the default argon2 (or password hashing) library in their language of choice and don't jump head-first into the rabbithole of fine-tuning argon2 parameters unless a contract or certification depend on it.
The documentation on this is... uh... intimidating? I come away from this with the sense that I need to learn a whole lot about cryptography to make a good decision here:
Do not reference these kinds of docs whenever you need practical, actionable advice. They serve their purpose, but are for a completely different kind of audience.
For anyone perusing this thread, your first resource for this kind of security advice should probably be the OWASP cheatsheets which is a living set of documents that packages current practice into direct recommendations for implementers.
"Real-World Software" maybe but not real world effectiveness.
A lot of effort was expended on modelling the hypothetical thing Argon2 is good at, but a reasonable question is: Does that make any real world difference? And my guess is that the answer, awkwardly, is approximately No.
If you use good passwords or you have successfully stopped using passwords in the decades we've known they're a bad idea, Argon2 makes no difference at all over any of the other reasonable choices, and nor does its configuration. If you figure that nobody will remember your password is hunter2 then Argon2 can't help you either. If the attack being undertaken is an auth bypass, Argon2 can't help. If they're stealing credentials, Argon2 can't help.
Most people don't use password managers and their passwords are very weak - Argon2 helps here. And even if your use a password that most would consider strong, if something like md5 is used then modern gpsu can do a crazy number of operations per second and have a serious shot at breaking then - Argon2 helps here. Not every programmer knows how to handle passwords properly, and may forget to use salt. Argon2 makes this impossible, and helps here. Finally when comparing to something like bcrypt, improvements are less significant, but improved gpu resistance won't hurt. And bcrypt has weird implementation quirks (password length restriction) that lead to real world vulnerabilities, argon does not.
Most people's passwords are in the category of "moderately weak, but not necessarily leaked to the public". If you are to accept passwords at all, you are responsible for protecting these users who have an expectation that your service is no worse than any other service's ability to protect passwords. There is no way surefire to force users to pick a truly entropic password. So an adequate amount of key stretching is not optional.
In a way, adequate password stretching helps to treat passwords as the toxic sludge they are. The goal is to store them in the most irrecoverable possible format, regardless of the poor decisions of the users who entered those passwords, so that you as the service don't end up being the one making the problem worse.
Strong hashes aren’t so useful for you the individual with a high entropy per-site password… they’re useful for responsible organizations trying to proactively mitigate the impact of a future data breach on users with bad password habits (which is a lot of users).
If ClownCo gets hacked that’s bad. If ClownCo gets hacked and discloses millions of sets of credentials, it is now enabling a new wave of credential stuffing attacks.
I feel like my biggest issue last time I implemented Argon2 was which settings to use. There are so many different opinions, people posting helpful but untrue info, etc that it gets a bit mind boggling on what to actually believe. I spent hours on it and still didn't really find a sane consensus. I'm sure it makes more sense to someone in the crypto space, but this has got to be easier for widespread adoption. Sane defaults, or 'here are 3 example groups of settings and when it's recommended.'
In the end I gave in and just used what Bitwarden uses. I figured they probably knew what they were doing more than I did.
bcrypt is fine. scrypt is fine. Argon2 is fine. Even PBKDF2, in most configurations, is fine. You can basically just put them on a board and throw a dart.
For a university self service portal that was a green field project I selected Argon2 as the password hashing algorithm. For evaluation I went pretty deep into how to implement password storage myself, to then opt for OpenLDAP, which we use now.
I really liked what I saw there. Argon2 has some adjustable settings for hash complexity that allow you to select your own tradeoff between cracking resistance and resource use. And not only that Argon2 provides everything needed to rehash on the fly when these setting change, which makes it really future-proof.
The (offical) argon2 libraries I used were all well written and documented, the integration into OpenLDAP very straight-forward. One painpoint we had was with OpenRadius, that instead of just asking the LDAP server to check a password decides to read the hash from LDAP and then try to verify it. And of course Argon2 is not supported..
We found another better alternative way of achieving the same, without OpenRadius. I don't really know the details here, but as of now (3 years in) we are still very happy with the choice.
> And not only that Argon2 provides everything needed to rehash on the fly when these setting change, which makes it really future-proof.
Argon2 itself doesn't necessarily provide this. Rather, this comes from convention and best practices implemented in various password libraries. The unix `crypt` syntax (`$id$rounds=yyy$salt$encrypted`) has been adapted for use with PBKDF2, bcrypt, scrypt, Argon2, etc. by a handful of libraries, and helps you store the algorithm and parameters in the same string so that having multiple formats and updating old ones is trivial. But it's not required for Argon2 implementers and was never mentioned in the original paper - the algorithm itself just specifies a function that returns raw bytes.
It's definitely nice to have, though. For the purpose of password hashing (which isn't necessarily the only thing Argon2 is good for), I wouldn't use a library that didn't have some sort of hash upgrade helper.
>...OWASP's recommended 46 MiB configuration reduces compromise rates by 42.5% compared to SHA-256...
Not sure that is a good comparison. The competition is against things like scrypt not raw hashes.
The default suggested 2GB Argon2 memory requirement is likely putting people off so there certainly is room for a different suggestion. It is just too bad this stuff wasn't worked out at the beginning.
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> 46.6% of deployments use weaker-than-OWASP parameters.
Sounds like a job for better default parameter values. I'm willing to bet most startups just install the default argon2 (or password hashing) library in their language of choice and don't jump head-first into the rabbithole of fine-tuning argon2 parameters unless a contract or certification depend on it.
https://argon2-cffi.readthedocs.io/en/stable/parameters.html
For anyone perusing this thread, your first resource for this kind of security advice should probably be the OWASP cheatsheets which is a living set of documents that packages current practice into direct recommendations for implementers.
Here's what it says about tuning Argon2:
https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/Password_Stor...
A lot of effort was expended on modelling the hypothetical thing Argon2 is good at, but a reasonable question is: Does that make any real world difference? And my guess is that the answer, awkwardly, is approximately No.
If you use good passwords or you have successfully stopped using passwords in the decades we've known they're a bad idea, Argon2 makes no difference at all over any of the other reasonable choices, and nor does its configuration. If you figure that nobody will remember your password is hunter2 then Argon2 can't help you either. If the attack being undertaken is an auth bypass, Argon2 can't help. If they're stealing credentials, Argon2 can't help.
In short, I disagree.
In a way, adequate password stretching helps to treat passwords as the toxic sludge they are. The goal is to store them in the most irrecoverable possible format, regardless of the poor decisions of the users who entered those passwords, so that you as the service don't end up being the one making the problem worse.
If ClownCo gets hacked that’s bad. If ClownCo gets hacked and discloses millions of sets of credentials, it is now enabling a new wave of credential stuffing attacks.
Deleted Comment
In the end I gave in and just used what Bitwarden uses. I figured they probably knew what they were doing more than I did.
I really liked what I saw there. Argon2 has some adjustable settings for hash complexity that allow you to select your own tradeoff between cracking resistance and resource use. And not only that Argon2 provides everything needed to rehash on the fly when these setting change, which makes it really future-proof.
The (offical) argon2 libraries I used were all well written and documented, the integration into OpenLDAP very straight-forward. One painpoint we had was with OpenRadius, that instead of just asking the LDAP server to check a password decides to read the hash from LDAP and then try to verify it. And of course Argon2 is not supported..
We found another better alternative way of achieving the same, without OpenRadius. I don't really know the details here, but as of now (3 years in) we are still very happy with the choice.
Argon2 itself doesn't necessarily provide this. Rather, this comes from convention and best practices implemented in various password libraries. The unix `crypt` syntax (`$id$rounds=yyy$salt$encrypted`) has been adapted for use with PBKDF2, bcrypt, scrypt, Argon2, etc. by a handful of libraries, and helps you store the algorithm and parameters in the same string so that having multiple formats and updating old ones is trivial. But it's not required for Argon2 implementers and was never mentioned in the original paper - the algorithm itself just specifies a function that returns raw bytes.
It's definitely nice to have, though. For the purpose of password hashing (which isn't necessarily the only thing Argon2 is good for), I wouldn't use a library that didn't have some sort of hash upgrade helper.
https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/34452
Not sure that is a good comparison. The competition is against things like scrypt not raw hashes.
The default suggested 2GB Argon2 memory requirement is likely putting people off so there certainly is room for a different suggestion. It is just too bad this stuff wasn't worked out at the beginning.
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