Secret Security Questions Are a Joke 408
Hugh Pickens writes "Rebecca Rosen writes that when hackers broke into Mat Honan's Apple account last week, they couldn't answer his security questions but Apple didn't care and issued a temporary password anyway. This was a company disregarding its own measure, saying, effectively, security questions are a joke and we don't take them very seriously. But even if Apple had required the hackers to answer the questions, it's very likely that the hackers would have been able to find the right answers. 'The answers to the most common security questions — where did you go to high school? what is the name of the first street you lived on? — are often a matter of the public record,' writes Rosen, 'even more easily so today than in the 1980s when security questions evolved as a means of protecting bank accounts.' Part of the problem is that a good security question is hard to design and has to meet four criteria: A good security question should be definitive — there should only be one correct answer; Applicable — the question should be possible to answer for as large a portion of users as possible; Memorable — the user should have little difficulty remembering it; and Safe — it should be difficult to guess or find through research. Unfortunately few questions fit all these criteria and are known only by you. 'Perhaps mother's maiden name was good enough for banking decades ago, but I'm pretty sure anyone with even a modicum of Google skills could figure out my mom's maiden's name,' concludes Rosen. Passwords have reached the end of their useful life adds Bruce Schneier. 'Today, they only work for low-security applications. The secret question is just one manifestation of that fact.'"
Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Let people design their own question.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But the lazy will make questions like "What is 2+2?" or other such nonsense.
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
And as long as you always answer 42, or 416 what is the problem with that?
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Informative)
And as long as you always answer 42, or 416 what is the problem with that?
This is pretty much what I do. I have a password that changes based on the question, but isn't actually the answer to the question.
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think that would fly. If a person's bank account gets hacked, the bank usually (always?) picks up the tab. It's in their interests to get people to bank online - it is significantly cheaper than hiring tellers. If I were on the hook for security flaws at the bank, I'd never bank online.
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Hell I did it with Blizzard for what, $30 and I got a plush toy.
If banks wanted to mitigate the risk, they could justify the cost easily.
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Agreed. But obviously they have done a cost-benefit analysis and decided against this so far.
I personally like the Google 2-step authentication. Send a temporary code to my phone.
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Agreed. But obviously they have done a cost-benefit analysis and decided against this so far.
I personally like the Google 2-step authentication. Send a temporary code to my phone.
I too like the Google 2-step authentication, but I'm probably screwed if someone steals my phone since they'll have access to my email and SMS verification. I have a 5 digit PIN on the phone, but I don't know how secure a phone PIN is against a determined hacker. If my phone is lost or stolen, hopefully I can send a remote wipe before they hack it.
One thing that I do that inadvertently helps protect me against hack attacks is that I always use a unique email address when I sign up at a site, something like
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Interesting)
I do similar, but with a wildcard subdomain so user@something.mydomain.com, the reasons for this are:
1, spammers will try to brute force common email account names once they get a domain to target
2, i can override the wildcard by creating specific mx records for a given hostname, and thus lose the spam without my mailserver having to process it at all, usually i redirect it to the mx records of the server that sold me out.
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Hell I did it with Blizzard for what, $30 and I got a plush toy.
This has always bothered me. My Blizzard and SWTOR accounts have much stronger authentication (from a user perspective; not sure about the underlying technical security measures) schemes than my bank account. My bank only allows a maximum of 14 characters in a password and severely limits you on what special characters you can use. They also have no form of secondary authentication, such as Blizzard's Battle.net Authenticator. Finally, their security questions are a joke, all along the lines of those mentioned in TFS--"What is your mother's maiden name" and the like.
My solution to bad security questions? Answer unasked questions. What's your mother's maiden name? Pepperoni pizza. What street did you live on? Empire State Building. Then use different answers for different sites, like you should your passwords. Just be sure you can keep track of them--either an encrypted file or a password manager program.
I'm quite bummed by current developments... (Score:3)
In Mexico, the two banks I use use two-factor authentication — A password (with some non-obviousness requirements, but yes, in the end they put stupid hard limits on the entropy, such as a maximum of 8 characters) and a security token. I have had one for over six years (lost the second one, but it lasted ~5 years on me) without a hiccup.
They are now telling me it's safer to kill the tokens and use a SMS to my cell phone as the second factor. Right, as if there is phone coverage always, everywhere. As
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So like ATMs and how they were supposed to save everyone time and money because you didn't have to visit a bank with a live person but which now you have to pay to get your money out if the ATM isn't from your bank?
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Mine is, "What do you hate about c++?" when it is optional. People are good at making up their own questions if they care. And security is only as good as you care about it. It is impossible to force people to use security despite the attempts.
Re:Simple solution (Score:4, Insightful)
At the same time, expecting people to be security experts is not going to be successful. You might have a good grasp of it, but chances are you have some exposure to it. It might not occur to your proverbial grandma that people can track down her mother's name.
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Funny)
It might not occur to your proverbial grandma that people can track down her mother's name.
That's because, as everyone knows, people from Proverbia are idiots.
Re:mother's name (Score:5, Insightful)
How did the summary miss the chance to mention Facebook? Oh, they don't mention the F-word (!!) for once when it makes the Zuck look bad?
For lists of questions that don't include "design it yourself", Facebook is the Walmart of Secret Question Busters.
(Simulation)
"Yay, I feel special, I made a Facebook account! Let's tell the whole world who I am! I'm ______ ______, I born and raised up in Philly, shout out to all the Main Street peeps! My whole family is there in Philly. Let's Like Mom, and Mom's whole family! I named my cat after Susan Boyle's, Pebbles."
(Later, looks at security questions. "Doh!")
Re:Simple solution (Score:4, Insightful)
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Mine is, "What do you hate about c++?" when it is optional.
That's no good, there has to be only one answer !
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Funny)
A good idea, but I'd hate having to remember--exactly--a 5,000 word essay in case I need to reset my password.
Re:Simple solution (Score:4, Funny)
And what happens if you loose the salt?
It dumps out into a big pile on my friend's plate. Hilarious.
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Even simpler solution: design your own answers. Yes, you'll get funny silences over the phone when you tell that the rep that you were born "On the moon", that the street you grew up on was "the yellow brick road", and that your mothers maiden name was Humpty Dumpty. The upshot is that no one can guess, the answers are meaningful to only you, there is only one answer (the fake, important name and place), and, because the answers are whatever you think they should be, applicable.
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that if you don't use them very often (say only for a password reset) it's easy to forget what answers you gave.
On trick is to give true answers, but for someone else, i.e. you answer as if you were Linus Torvalds or Queen Victoria. But then you still have to remember who ...
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Yup. I had an embarassing phone conversation with my state's tax department because a year earlier I set the secret question to "What is the password?" and a year later I had naturally forgotten the answer.
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Funny)
You mean the cute customer service Indian guy.
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing's funnier than harassing a minimum wage worker who has no choice but to take your shit or be fired, eh?
Let me guess: you're a CEO?
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This is a bad idea, since security questions are probably stored unencrypted or at least using a reversible cipher -- the people on the other end of support need to be able to compare your answer, and there needs to be some leeway especially with spoken answers and spelling variations.
Unless, of course, y
Then make it simple... use an algorithm! (Score:5, Interesting)
Use an algorithm.
Use real answers, but replace vowels with the letter Q. (for example)
Mother's maiden name: Smith => SmQth
First pet: Spot => SpQt
Just make up a general rule. This is what I do with my passwords. They are based on a rule that I can remember. Then you can apply that rule to any password.
Like switch the first and last letters. Smith = hmitS, Spot = tpoS. Or use numbers. Or a combination. It quickly looks like nonsense, but if you use a rule then you can apply it. Or change it. If you have to change a password, then switch from using Q to W, then E, then R, then T, etc.
You can even write down your rule in plain site. If I wrote down "flip Q" as a reminder, it would remind me to flip the first and last letters, then replace vowels with Q.
And I just came up with this one for this post. The one I actually used is based on something nobody could guess, and has been altered over the years so that I am the only one that knows it. And it works! I still remember an intern at my first job left to go back to school in 1994, and he told me his unix password in case I needed to get into his account. It was CIrpotb, (Clearly I remember picking on the boy,) from Pearl Jam's song Jeremy.
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So now you have to remember nonsensical answers to every important site you use, in addition to a password. You can't use the same answers everywhere, because when one gets hacked, all other account security questions are vulnerable.
In other words, passwords aren't secure, so lets use even more of them! This is like saying credit card numbers get stolen, so the solution is to add some more to the back of the card.
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Funny)
I had a friend who built an entire fake persona that she used to answer her security questions. Address, parents, pets, you name it.
In hind site she was probably a little schizophrenic.
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Funny)
She is you.
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I use my GRANDmother's maiden name. Since she hasn't used it since circa 1925 I figure it will be very difficult to locate.
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Re:Simple solution (Score:4, Informative)
Or go to passwordmaker.org [passwordmaker.org], and use the security question (all lower case and no punctuation) as URL and your own secret password. Set the character set to hex digits so that the answer is easy to read out over the phone.
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't solve the real problem, that banks think that these question and answers provide any sort of security whatsoever. What is the difference between this Q&A scheme and a password? Specifically, these security questions are exactly identical to a password that is stored in the clear (no hash, no salt) and is intended to be communicated to humans, and for which an attacker only has to guess one out of 4 correctly?
We know that this is bad practice for passwords. Why do we tolerate it for "security questions"?
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Specifically, these security questions are exactly identical to a password that is stored in the clear (no hash, no salt) and is intended to be communicated to humans, and for which an attacker only has to guess one out of 4 correctly?
I agree with your general premise that these are just secondary passwords. That's actually how I treat them: I use my password manager to generate and remember random strings of characters as my security question answers. What was my first elementary school's name? "QQw9i?7JJq[m".
However, these don't have to be stored in cleartext any more than your primary password. Ideally, the authenticating system should hash your reply and compare it to the hashed version from their database just like you would normall
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That's actually being done by a number already by some companies. That still doesn't help though if someone enters a question with an easy answer.
The "best" thing people can do is put in wrong answers to their security questions. Unfortunately if someone does so and forgets the answer, then that person can't get access to his or her account. Unless of course that person has an account with Apple or Amazon in which case the secret answers aren't needed. Hence the problem with the entire password system.
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Security questions are completely pointless. They were implemented because idiots used the same username / email adress and passwords across different websites. So once a hacker got all the info from a poorly secured website he was able to access all the user accounts.
All you need is a username and password, if you want a 2nd security check use the email you can't replace in 5 min within the account (put a 2 months delay). If the user is so stupid to use the same password on the email let him pay the p
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How do you deal with sites whose stupid password "complexity" rules disallow the passwords generated by an app like LastPass? You know, the braindead rules that ignore total length, and only care that 3fa456d9eee71e8b doesn't have uppercase characters, has three 'e' characters in a row, has a 3-character sequence like '456', and/or lacks punctuation? Or worse, sites that reject it for HAVING digits, or being 16 characters instead of 12(max)?
I tried a program like that ~6 years ago (I forget which one... it
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Informative)
I once had an account on a site that asked me to select three questions from a list of a couple dozen then answer them.
When I needed to recover my password, it asked me to select the same three questions from a list of a couple dozen then answer them again.
I never managed to recover my password.
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Why do people always assume that they answer to the security question has to be correct? Or even remotely connected to the question, for that matter? Do all the internet searches you want, you'll never figure out that my high school was "Never give guns to ducks."
Re:Simple solution (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpose of security questions is not security - its reducing customer service workload due to forgotten passwords.
In most implementations its an overall reduction in security, since the security questions constitute a backdoor to the password, rather than an additional factor of authentication.
BYO (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:BYO (Score:5, Funny)
My favorite make-up-your-own pair, which a CSR at a bank was once forced to read to me over the phone:
Q: "You're not going out dressed like that are you?"
A: "You can't tell me what to do! You're not my real father!"
Re:BYO (Score:5, Funny)
Re:BYO (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather just be able to disable the questions entirely, relying on a good password and if that is lost/whatever, account specific information being verified by a human on the phone.
My problems with these "secret questions" are:
1. They are obviously stored cleartext
2. They can be used to "substitute" for your non-cleartext password
3. Because 1+2=3, if someone breaks in and grabs a dump of the table, they now effectively have your account. These "insecurity questions" are more of a liability if you are not one to just lose passwords. Crutch for the stupid, barrier for the secure.
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The problem here is often lack of good choices like:
Paternal Grandfather's name? for someone who is John Smith III
Or name of city you grew up in, when it is your current city?
At this point Mother's maiden name looks good when given 3 choices
Re:BYO (Score:4, Insightful)
Making them completely pointless, since you'd only need them if you lost the password which would presumably also be in the password manager.
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They were already pointless. A backdoor password into my account that is REQUIRED to be something people can just Google about me? Genius.
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That's Not Possible (Score:4, Funny)
I'm sorry. Apple cannot make mistakes anymore. Clearly this is just anti-Apple-types trying to give the greatest, most wonderful, most lauded, most glorious company that has ever or will ever exist.
I'm now turning my iPod up to 11 to drown out the filthy lies of the naysayers. Jobs be praised.
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I'm now turning my iPod up to 11 to drown out the filthy lies of the naysayers. Jobs be praised.
Didn't they remove that function, in order to protect you from yourself?
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they admitted that one of their CSRs didn't follow the rules
everyone here writes bugs with code and works it out over time. lots of times in production. but someone else makes a mistake and its time to burn them at the stake.
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Part of the problem is the CSR had the option to not follow the rules, they should have a box to type the challenge response, and the computer should have enough logic to only accept a close match, not counting capitalization or minor spelling differences. If they can't get it right, escalate the call to a supervisor level who may then have more leeway.
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>>>Clearly this is just anti-Apple-types
I consider Apples to be like Chryslers, Lexuses, and Acuras. Severely-overpriced for what you get. BUT in this case you are being unfair. It wasn't Apple that dropped the ball but one of their minimum wage employees.
Apple should fire the employee and any other employees who hand-out new passwords w/o proper authentication by the caller (answering the secret questions). If Apple fails to do that, THEN you can vilify them.
Re:That's Not Possible (Score:4, Funny)
IPads only goes up to 10. 11 would be too complicated, like a second mouse button.
What is Your Favourite Colour? (Score:5, Funny)
What is your quest?
What is the air-speed velocity of a coconut-laden swallow?
Coconut laden? (Score:2)
I don't know much about coconut-laden swallows, but an unladen swallow [style.org] flies along at roughly 10 meters per second (9.9 mps, per rough calculation).
Where did you get the thing about coconut-laden swallow anyway? Was that a line from a movie or something?
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I'm sorry, Lad.
1975 was a long time ago [imdb.com]... Nearly in a galaxy, far, far away....
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It would be funny if your answer was a question - "An African or a European Swallow?"
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I don't kno.... (Insert "Wilhelm")
Who answers security questions honestly? (Score:5, Insightful)
The best use of security question is to answer them dishonestly/humorously with responses you will remember, or can write down.
Favorite movie? Gigli
First Car? Moon Rover
Mother In Laws Name? Dead
etc..etc..
Re:Who answers security questions honestly? (Score:4, Insightful)
I usually just generate additional passwords and save them in KeePass.
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The best use of security question is to answer them dishonestly/humorously with responses you will remember, or can write down.
Favorite movie? Gigli First Car? Moon Rover Mother In Laws Name? Dead etc..etc..
Of course people will forget the right wrong answer, without chance to find it ever again. Which is likely the reason why companies have started to allow a way around those questions in the first place.
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The best use of security question is to answer them dishonestly/humorously with responses you will remember, or can write down.
This, a million times over.
It's not the questions that are the problem, it's the idiots giving them obvious, straight answers.
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This completely negates the purpose for me. If I can remember my nonsense answer, I can equally remember the actual password, and using a standard nonsense answer on for all logins is no different than using the same password for all logins, a big no-no.
Recorded preference in tablecloth colors (Score:2)
Douglas Adams nailed it...again.
Don't Give the Real Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Google me all you want, the real answer to "mother's maiden name" for me is "{ah23#>K&Ep", which I store in 1Password.
Of course, that does no good if Apple simply ignores the security questions.
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Google me all you want, the real answer to "mother's maiden name" for me is "{ah23#>K&Ep", which I store in 1Password.
Of course, that does no good if Apple simply ignores the security questions.
So to recover the password for your account you also stored in 1Password, you use a security question, the answer of which you take from 1Password. I can see no flaw in your reasoning.
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Yes, that would be an accurate summary. Answers are generally required,and I'm not about to give the actual answer. I do not intend to ever use the answers, as I view security questions to be a hole and not a help, but they might as well be recorded.
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Of course, that does no good if Apple simply ignores the security questions.
Everyone here seems to be missing that point.
If they will reset your password over the phone while enabling you to add an email address to the account and without reasonably certainty you are who you say you are, they have thoroughly demonstrated they do not give half a shit about the security of your information. Period. There are banks like this as well. It would be trivial to take over someone's financial and digital life in today's world with a little knowledge of who they are.
Don't answer the Security questions "correctly"!!! (Score:2)
When you fill out the "form" to define the security questions, Don't put the correct answers in.. purposely put a false answer, obviously one that only you know.. My dad makes up a "youngest son" to put in those security questions so there is no way someone can "scour" social network sites to find the answers.
Use the First Girlfriend question (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't feel all *that* tricky (Score:2)
What is your memorable place? seems to fit all those criteria, for example.
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I wouldn't even know how to begin to answer that question. I don't have a single most memorable place, but a small collection of special places that are about equally memorable. How would I remember which one I used?
This is no different than "what's your favorite..." questions. My favorite anything is not fixed. My favorites change over time, so I still end up having to outright guess what the right answer is.
what was the name of your first pet? (Score:2)
lots of cartoon animal names you can use
who says you have to use real answers to these questions?
trope: Stock Animal Name (Score:2)
lots of cartoon animal names you can use
Which gives attackers the option to use the rainbow tables [tvtropes.org].
You're doing it wrong (Score:2)
Security questions are an opportunity for additional long passwords.
Favorite color: ALQbpFcWvvFiJlnEh5uuC0lpJZFHAvIcMuXrOh46L3bc24V39m
Where you grew up: 1t7jpfr7zzp87kOJTMOFw5qf1ReWKoxoeRu8U7vuz5TfPwypkU
First pet: gzcPme09nDYPHXvfvyi8FbpP9hX5cjqMiVi0MWd61sxyCIJjaG
Just use the prompt as the index for the key, which you've saved in your favorite key store, like keepassx.
Even so (Score:2)
Mother's maiden name (Score:5, Informative)
I had to resort to adding layers of generations when my (now ex) wife attempted to open credit cards behind my back.
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I use my mother's mother's mother's maiden name.
Why? Are you legally obligated to give the correct answer?
Well (Score:3)
Just treat them like I do. Select any "question" and type another password into the answer box (one that you never give out).
Should it come to a password reset password where you're asked for no, NOBODY will ever guess it and you'll be able to reset your password either automatically (if they allow you to), or via a customer service representative (who will be wondering why your mother's maiden name was AH8hfds86, but who cares?).
Just as secure as anything else and requiring you to give out zero additional personal information, and totally UNABLE to be discovered by someone who happens to know you, for instance (unlike DOB, maiden names, etc.)
Security questions: FAIL (Score:5, Insightful)
Many security questions are a failure from the start due to poor selection. While one would expect that a security question would challenge an objective fact, many of them don't. Instead they challenge subjective facts, most often "favorite" things. What happens to a person's answers when his mental list of favorite things has changed? I've encountered some instances where these "favorite" questions were so prevalent that there wasn't even one objective question as a choice. While it's true that "favorites" might be less susceptible to data mining than objective facts, the last thing security questions should ever do is create the possibility that the legitimate user might be locked out because he can't recall what his "favorite" was at the time of the account's creation. This is akin to the bad habit of using e-mail addresses as usernames. What's more, many of these choose very poor subjects that lead to potentially ambiguous answers; there have been many occasions when I couldn't decide the correct answer to a "favorite" question even at the time of creation, much less a year later.
REal security (Score:3)
We need real security - which comes from an obvious list of last attempts to log in. That way we know when and where (IP address tells all), someone tried to log into our accounts. If we don't recognize the times and places, then we can act.
We certainly can't trust the websites themselves to protect us.
Security Questions are a Joke? (Score:3)
Question 1: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Question 2: Why is six afraid of seven?
* dodges tomatoes *
random strings in a password file (Score:2)
There is an easy workaround for this. You go to the trouble of using a high-entropy password for a certain web site, and then their web interface insists on knowing something like your dog's name, which would be a huge security hole. Well, whatever method you use for making a secure password (I use a hash function), just use that to generate your dog's name. So I'll tell google that my dog's name is bHo3HI38, and lolcats.edu that it's QRYh3l34.
Give up on wanting it to be memorable. That's pointless and self
Security questions are designed to weaken security (Score:3)
They are de facto alternative shared secrets used for authentication, so that instead of there being just one password that will open an account there are more. Because the answers are mostly things we don't think of as particularly secret and many systems use the same sets of questions, the result is what everyone knows is bad practice: a weak password used in many places.
The right fix for the "security question" mess is not better questions or trick answers, it is to eliminate the process that demands them. A human-mediated password reset process is always going to be subject to social engineering and if the humans mediating that process are low-skill CS reps whose work is only deemed to be worth the prevailing call center wages in Chennai or Manila, the social engineering is likely to be unchallenging. If you must offer a way for a user to recover an account for which they've forgotten the password, it should not be vulnerable to attack via research or pleading.
Comment removed (Score:3)
It's not the questions (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the answers. For the best security the answers should have nothing to do with the question, just like you see in all those old spy movies:
Q: What is your favorite color
A: walkaboutclock
Q: What was the name of the street you grew up on?
A: g!blix05
When only the account holder can possibly know the answers then there can be no social engineering to bypass the security.
None of this, of course, has any effect if policies and procedures at the vendor site allow for the questions to be bypassed. As I have posted elsewhere, we don't know the contents of the alleged call; the operator could have been threatened, blackmailed, bribed or even an accomplice.
The problem with security questions is that (Score:3)
those with memorable answers are precisely those most likely to be very important (i.e. likely public or easily accessible) information.
You're stuck with "What is your mother's maiden name?" (visit an Genealogy website and search for the person to find out) or the alternative, "What was the phone number of the first person you ever dated?" (Something you yourself likely can't find.)
I've noticed a sharp rise in these kinds of difficult-information questions in recent months. The problem is that if I have to go digging through my personal archives to find the information (if I can even find it at all), it's quite possible that I won't be able to find it when I need it later on, and likely that I won't simply remember it offhand.
I know people that have taken to generating secure random passwords and using these as the answers to questions, then keeping a spreadsheet with (a) domain, (b) questions, and (c) the random password generated for each question. But of course then there's a spreadsheet hanging around that contains this information, and the labor overhead involved becomes a disincentive to take the questions seriously at all (which is why I also know a person that answers every single security question they're asked to answer with "None".)
But seriously, at the practical level, who can answer:
What was the first name of your third grade teacher?
What was the nearest cross street to the home you lived in as a child?
Who was your sports or other hero at eight years old?
What was the name of your boss on your first job?
All of these kinds of questions dig back into obscure things that haven't been important to most people in many years, not to mention that many people wouldn't have known in the first place, and/or the answers could be so ambiguous that you'll struggle to remember what you entered ("Superman?" "My dad?" "Neil Armstrong?") given the ambiguities and categorial thinking involved.
I tend to think that the answer to security is a social one—calculate the risks and use "good enough" security, then assume that some percentage of security cases will fail and maintain resources/insurance to address the resulting cases in a way that allows you to continue to do business and gain users/customers. More or less what happens with banking right now.
They aren't "security" questions... (Score:3)
These are things are not about security - they are about convenience. Primarily they are used for self-service password resetting. I don't think beefing up the "security" on convenience questions is really very helpful.
If you are serious about your security, you should pick randomized strings to use as the answers to the convenience questions, then store them in a nice secure password safe.
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But then you are, in effect, using the same password for all your logins.
Re: (Score:3)
This right here is at the core of almost all problems in the world: the inability of people to differentiate between the actions of an individual and a group, or projecting the individual actions into a collective mindset.
Yeah, totally sucks how everybody does that.