Security

633 readers

2 users here now

A community for discussion about cybersecurity, hacking, cybersecurity news, exploits, bounties etc.

Rules :

All instance-wide rules apply.
Keep it totally legal.
Remember the human, be civil.
Be helpful, don't be rude.

Icon base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Mitigating attacks based on knowing the length of a Windows Hello PIN - The Old New Thing (devblogs.microsoft.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

1 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Describes considerations of convenience and security of auto-confirmation while entering a numeric PIN - which leads to information disclosure considerations.

An attacker can use this behavior to discover the length of the PIN: Try to sign in once with some initial guess like “all ones” and see how many ones can be entered before the system starts validating the PIN.

Is this a problem?

top 1 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Knowing the length of a random pin/password is roughly as valuable as knowing one of the characters, if it's a concern just make it two longer and you have just improved security.

I don't know how that applies to non-random pins/password.