jormaig comments on OP finds vulnerability where a forum sends you your password in plaintext over email and everyone misses the forest for the trees

OP finds vulnerability where a forum sends you your password in plaintext over email and everyone misses the forest for the trees (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 years ago by JackbyDev@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

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This thread is frustrating. Everyone seems more interested in nitpicking the specifics of what OP is saying and are ignoring that a forum sends you your password (not an automatically generated one) in an email on registration.

[–] jormaig@programming.dev 7 points 3 years ago (5 children)

But the thing is that you should never have access to the plaintext password and thus you should never be able to receive it in an email. You should store the salted hash of the password instead of the password itself.

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[–] 8ace40@programming.dev 4 points 3 years ago (4 children)

These kind of forums don't store the plaintext password, they send an email while in memory, and hash them afterwards. Still bad security, but it's not storing it in plaintext.

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[–] Miaou@jlai.lu 2 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

It's storing it in plain text in at least one third party's database. Indeed, it's not stored in plain text locally, it's doing something much worse

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[–] sekhat@lemmy.temporus.me 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

But you are supposed to change that generated password as soon as you use it to login. Now I have no idea about these forums, but you'd expect the software to enforce that need to change

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[–] Miaou@jlai.lu 1 point 3 years ago

It's still stupid because people reuse password. They shouldn't, but they do. If it's one time login, make it a token. There's zero reason to ever email a password, period

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[–] jormaig@programming.dev 0 points 3 years ago

But your password should never reach the server. It should be hashed already at the client and then salted at the server with a random hash. Then you store the salted hash

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