Well considering that the US nuclear launch codes were just zeros for a while

I’ve seen some statements that this was apocryphal.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/01/21/air-force-swears-our-nuke-launch-code-was-never-00000000/

Though you could argue – since there was a point in time prior to PALs where there was no authorization system at all – that a very functionally-similar state existed prior to the implementation of those codes.

Launch codes aren’t to block China from authorizing a launch. They’re there to keep someone in the military from doing a launch without authorization. China is probably one of the parties who least wants said codes leaking.

If you have a couple hundred people who can start a nuclear war, that war becomes a whole lot more likely than if only one can.

From China’s standpoint, the next best number of people who can launch against them after 0 is 1.

The British used bicycle keys on their nuclear bombs.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7097101.stm

As people learned around that time, a really great way to bypass bicycle locks is with a ballpoint pen.

https://www.wired.com/2004/09/twist-a-pen-open-a-lock/

That was aimed more at keeping honest people honest.

I mean, when you give them a number on the phone, the guy at the other end is just going to be putting the number in the same place the website does.

When you pay in-store with a credit card, probably same thing.

EDIT: Well, unless, for the last case, one’s using a cryptographic-signature-based mechanism, like the smartcard chip or wireless authentication. But if it’s a magstrip or someone punching numbers in…

It’s hunter2

For the uninitiated, this was a purported IRC conversation on bash.org (which apparently is down now, sadly):

https://web.archive.org/web/20040604194346/http://bash.org/?244321

  Cthon98: hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars
  Cthon98: ********* see!
  AzureDiamond: hunter2
  AzureDiamond: doesnt look like stars to me
  Cthon98: *******
  Cthon98: thats what I see
  AzureDiamond: oh, really?
  Cthon98: Absolutely
  AzureDiamond: you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
  AzureDiamond: haha, does that look funny to you?
  Cthon98: lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to us as *******
  AzureDiamond: thats neat, I didnt know IRC did that
  Cthon98: yep, no matter how many times you type hunter2, it will show to us as *******
  AzureDiamond: awesome!
  AzureDiamond: wait, how do you know my pw?
  Cthon98: er, I just copy pasted YOUR ******'s and it appears to YOU as hunter2 cause its your pw
  AzureDiamond: oh, ok.

I’ll add that I’m a little suspicious that the event is apocryphal. Cliff Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg described a (true) story of a West German hacker, Markus Hess, working for the KGB during the Cold War to try to break into US industrial systems (e.g. chip design, OS source code) and military systems (various military bases and defense projects). Hess had broken into a system at the University of California at Berkeley, where Stoll was studying astrophysics and working as a sysadmin. Stoll discovered the breakin, and decided to leave the hacker alone, to use the system as a honeypot, and try to figure out what systems the hacker was attacking so that he could warn them, so he had a pretty extensive writeup on what was going on. Stoll had been providing updates to the FBI, CIA, NSA, Army and Air Force computer security personnel, and a few others.

Stoll was trying to figure out who the hacker was, as the hacker was only touching his system via other systems that he’d broken into, like a US defense contractor; he didn’t know that the hacker was German.

Hess used “hunter” or a variant, like “jaeger”, German for “hunter”, as a password on many of the systems that he broke into; this was one of several elements that led Stoll to guess that he might be German; that sounds very suspiciously similar to the password in the above conversation.

I’d add that the whole story is a pretty interesting read. Eventually, Stoll – who was having trouble getting interest from various US security agencies, which were not really geared up to deal with network espionage at the time, made up a fake computer system at UC Berkeley that claimed it contained information related to Strategic Defense Initiative, part of a major US ballistic missile defense project, and indicated that a physical letter had to be sent to get access. Hess noticed it, handed the information off to his KGB handlers, and a bit later, a Bulgarian spy in Pittsburgh tried sending said letter to get access to the system. When Stoll handed that tidbit off, that got a lot of attention, because the FBI was definitely geared up for catching spies in the US trying to compromise US military systems, and exposing domestic spy rings was right up their alley. The FBI finally put a bunch of people on it, Stoll got to give a presentation at the CIA, etc.

LAN Manager passwords were hashed

Looks like it was worse than I remember.

Pretty sure that you’re thinking of an additional, unrelated security hole. I recall that there were attacks against NTLM hashed passwords too – IIRC, one could sniff login attempts against Windows fileservers on the same network, extract hashed passwords going by on the network, and then run dictionary attacks against them, which sounds like the exploit being described at your link. That was actually worse in that it also affected the (more-widely-used in production in businesses for serious things) Windows NT servers.

The hole I was attacking was specific to the fileserver in the 9x line, and it wasn’t a weak hash or unsalted hash, but a lack of hashing – it was specifically a case where the passwords were not stored in a hashed form. That was fundamentally a requirement for the attack to be be appearing in this way; if they had had any form of hashing, even with the length verification bug, you would have had to extract the entire hash, then do a local brute-force attack against the hash to reverse the hash, and gotten the whole password at once rather than having it show up a digit at a time.

Windows had a lot of security problems around that time.

EDIT: Regarding your hole, it sounds like NTLM authentication still is prone to problems:

https://www.csoonline.com/article/571263/ntlm-relay-attacks-explained-and-why-petitpotam-is-the-most-dangerous.html

2021

Attackers can intercept legitimate Active Directory authentication requests to gain access to systems. A PetitPotam attack could allow takeover of entire Windows domains.

EDIT2: Oh, if you mean “worse than I remember” talking about the case reduction, then never mind – I thought that you were saying that the length check bug made your hole worse.

They didn’t put the text in, but if you remember the original movie, the two situations are pretty close, actually. The AI, Joshua, was being told by David Lightman – incorrectly – that he was Professor Falken.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R0mD3uWk5c

Joshua: Greetings, Professor Falken.

David: We’re in!

Jennifer: [giggles]

David [to Jennifer]: It thinks I’m Falken!

David [typing, to Joshua]: Hello.

Joshua: How are you feeling today?

David: [typing, to Joshua]: I’m fine. How are you?

Joshua: Excellent. It’s been a long time. Can you explain the removal of your user account on June 23rd, 1973?

David [to Jennifer]: They must have told it he died.

David [typing, to Joshua]: People sometimes make mistakes.

Joshua: Yes, they do.

My own Wargames “this is not realistic” and then years later, in real life: “oh, for fuck’s sake” moment when it happened was the scene where Joshua was trying to work out the ICBM launch code, and was getting it digit-by-digit. I was saying “there is absolutely no security system in the world where one can remotely compute a passcode a digit at a time, in linear time, by trying them against the systems”.

So some years later, in the Windows 9x series, for the filesharing server feature, Microsoft stored passwords in a non-hashed format. Additionally, there was a bug in the password validation code. The login message sent by a remote system when logging in sent contained a length, and Windows only actually verified that that many bytes of the password matched, which meant that one could get past the password in no more than 256 tries, since you only had to match the first byte if the length was 1. Someone put out some proof of concept code for Linux, a patch against Samba’s smbclient, to exploit it. I recall thinking “I mean, there might not be something critical on the share itself, but you can also extract the filesharing password remotely by just incrementing the length and finding the password a digit at a time, which is rather worse, since even if they patch the hole, a lot of people are not going to change the passwords and probably use their password for multiple things.” I remember modifying the proof-of-concept code, messaged a buddy downstairs, who had the only convenient Windows 98 machine sitting around on the network, “Hey, Marcus, can I try an exploit I just wrote against your computer?” Marcus: “Uh, what’s it do?” “Extracts your filesharing password remotely.” Marcus: “Yeah, right.” Me: “I mean, it should. It’ll make the password visible, that okay with you?” Marcus: “Sure. I don’t believe you.”

Five minutes later, he’s up at my place and we’re watching his password be printed on my computer’s screen at a rate of about a letter every few seconds, and I’m saying, “you know, I distinctly remember criticizing Wargames years back as being wildly unrealistic on the grounds that absolutely no computer security system would ever permit something like this, and yet, here we are, and now maybe one of the most-widely-deployed authentication systems in the world does it.” Marcus: “Fucking Microsoft.”