From: Dufresne, Pierre (PIERRE.DUFRESNE@MESS.GOUV.QC.CA)
Date: Thu Sep 29 2005 - 09:19:31 EDT
Thanks for the advice,
I am focusing on stolen laptops. With the password-on-boot SYSKEY feature I
was hoping to protect the cache entries stored on those machines.
The thing is, I was planning to make EFS available for the laptops (XP sp1).
The problem is, if the attacker can crack the passwords (after dumping the
cache entries with CacheDump), he gets access to the EFS files.
That's why this password security thread had me worry.
Thanks
P.
-----Original Message-----
From: Thor (Hammer of God) [mailto:thor@hammerofgod.com]
Sent: 28 septembre 2005 16:55
To: Dufresne, Pierre; pen-test@securityfocus.com
Subject: Re: Password "security" - was"Passwords with Lan Manager (LM) under
Windows" and "Whitespace in passwords"
Just a side note-- if you are using the password-on-boot feature, make sure
you take that into account when considering unattended power-cycles,
restarts, power failures, or other reboot events that may occur when no
personnel are on site to enter the password. That's an easy to DOS yourself
if you are not thinking about it. That's why the key-on-floppy is available
(make sure your BIOS is not set to boot from floppy first) but if your main
concern is lost or stolen resources, that may not really help you that much
unless you keep the floppy out of the unit, thus re-introducing the
self-imposed DOS issue again.
(Note that if any of the systems are (heaven forbid) NT4, that Microsoft has
a hotfix for SYSKEY'd SAMs to fix keystream re-use in the SAM encryption
that makes offline cracking easier. KB248183.)
You really need to weigh the risks of an unattended reboot DOSing you or
that of a box being "lost or stolen." I can't see how a box could get lost,
but if it's stolen, you'll be resetting all the passwords anyway... Which
way to go is really up to how much of a propensity each given even is likely
to occur...
t
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