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I am currently trying to create a edit password page (to change the user password).
I want to tell to the user that if he enters the same password than the old one then I will show an error message which shows that two passwords match and that's useless to change it.
Take a look https://prnt.sc/pe8xur
Is it a security issue if I do that ?
Thanks!
I currently have a password reset with the following flow:
generate a temporary password
email it to the user
The user then clicks on a link in the email, taking them to a page where they can enter their temporary password along with a new one.
My question is, how can I securely achieve a password reset without making the user have to copy a nasty temporary password?
I have considered sending the password as a query string in the link in the email since HTTPS traffic is encrytped, but I have read that this is still a poor choice due to various reasons.
Any suggestions are welcome, thanks!
(I have purposely left out information about my stack as I am looking for a technology agnostic solution)
I have a website that uses Windows Authentication to authenticate its users. Normally when a user accesses the site on an IE browser the username field is populated with the computers domain name and user name. This is usually incorrect and the user enters the correct username and their password and can access the site.
I have a user now on Windows 7 IE8(I beleive) and the username field in the credential prompt is being autopopulated with domain\userName except the username is incorrect and we cannot change it. The user is unable to log into the site because of this. Has anyone experienced this before? Does anyone know why the username field cannot be changed? Solutions I have tried:
Clearing cache and stored form data/passwords etc
Site is in users trusted sites. So I had the user change the settings to "Prompt for username and password" but the prompt still comes up with the username autopopulated and does not let her change it.
I have never run into this before. Our users do not have any issue logging in, its just this one corporate location that was just set up and is running Windows 7(Rest of the company is under Windows XP) If it matters this is a sharepoint 2010 web application
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated as I have an entire group of users with this problem. Im willing to bet this would not be an issue in a different browser but they need to be able to use IE for application compatibility reasons.
Thanks!
I was able to fix it by doing the following:
Go to Start, Control Panel, User Accounts, then click Manage Your Credentials, and look for the credentials to your site, if they are there Modify and “Remove from vault” ( I suppose you could Edit them to the correct credentials but I just removed it and it did not prompt her).
She had the wrong credentials stored there. Im not sure why clearing the cache and passwords from the internet options didnt work but this did.
I had this problem with a user where the domain stored with the credentials could not be changed. This is the only item online I could find even close to my problem. The user saw "user-pcdomain\localusername" auto entered in the form. He tried to correct it with "workdomain\workusername" but got a message saying "Please enter a user name and password". Eventually we realized that his system was sending "user-pcdomain\workdomain" as his username. I've never seen a login misfire like that.
In his case he did not have his credentials stored but needed to add credentials - "workdomain\workusername" - for all of the domains he needed to access.
The point is - to expand on the answer - that IE or Windows 7 or both will store credentials incorrectly on rare occasions and the solution is be creative about adding\editing\remove credentials with Manage Your Credentials
I was wondering what would be the safer option when users have forgotten their password
Send a randomly generated new password to the email address (all email addresses in my database are confirmed to work).
Or
Send an email with a link that expires within a certain time frame where the user can reset their password.
Aside from the fact the latter uses an extra table, what do you think is safer/better practice?
If you send an email containing the password, it means :
The password will go through some networks (unencrypted) and could be "seen"
The password will stay in the user's mail box
Which can be hacked
And just any one who has access to the computer might take a look
So, sending the password in an email doesn't seem that safe...
As a user, I would feel my password is "safer" with the link that contains some kind of token and expires after a while.
That "expires after a while" part is important, btw : it makes sure that if someone clicks on the link after some time (for instance, someone who accesses the user's mailbox), the link will not be used to generate a new password.
Of course, this means I won't be able to just "search in my mail box" to find the password -- but I can always ask for a new one I have forgotten it again ^^
Rather baffled by the other answers here. They're exactly the same. Both give access to the user's account, both are sent in plain text, and both are in common use. Pick whichever you prefer.
Enforce an immediate password change once they use the link/password, and have the link/password expire after 24-72 hours.
Send an email with a link that expires within a certain time frame where the user can reset their password.
That one, definitely.
E-mail is always in the clear (potentially your site connection may not be), and can touch more machines. Keep passwords out of e-mail. The temporary reset token also means that if the mailbox is hacked later on, the token is of no use any more.
Aside from the fact the latter uses an extra table,
It doesn't have to. You can generate a cryptographic token authorising a particular user to reset a password within a certain time frame; no extra data required.
An example using a HMAC based message authentication code (fancy hashing):
details= user_id+' '+token_expiry_timestamp
mac= hmac_sha2(server_secret, details)
token= details+' '+mac
then send the token to the user as part of the clickable URL in a mail. When you receive a click back, work out what the mac should be for that user and time with your server-side secret, and check that against the passed-in mac. If it matches, it must be a password request you signed earlier.
user_id, token_expiry_timestamp, mac= token split on ' '
details= user_id+' '+token_expiry_timestamp
if hmac_sha2(server_secret, details)!=mac
complain
else if token_expiry_timestamp<now
complain
else
allow password for user_id to be changed
This requires no state, but you should use shorter expire times as the tokens could be used multiple times if you do not record usage.
One difference that people seem to have neglected is that - taking a web application for example - a password reset option is usually open to anyone who accesses a site and knows the username/login of the account that they want to reset the password for.
By sending a link in an email that the user has to click in order to be able to reset their password, you avoid letting users accidentally or maliciously reset other people's passwords - all that will happen is they receive an email that ends with, "If you did not ask to reset your password, please ignore this email."
Even if it's not a security risk per se, resetting passwords without confirmation could be a major annoyance.
Obviously the latter is much safer. Email is like a postcard. Pretty much anyone can read it who wants to. Also, once the password is changed, send an email to close the loop.
As long as the URL doesn't ask for a password or some such, it still is better than the randomly sent password but only because it doesn't leave the password in plain text in an Inbox.
In other words, the link reduces the window of opportunity.
I've always been a fan of setting a hashcode and giving them a link.
Sending an email to the user afterwards letting them know they requested a password recovery link, and after they set one telling them their password was changed is usually a good courtesy in case there was a violation.
A user will very quickly react to an email saying their password was changed if they didn't mean to do it.
Unfortunately there is no real "SAFE" way. Security Questions an pins can help but are never truly secure.
Send them an email with a random, one time use,
password.
Force them to change the
password when they first arrive.
Notify them that they changed their
password.
Sending the random password is as much of a risk as sending the link. i.e. anyone can get the email first and log in as the user the first time.
By forcing the change, whoever gets their first can not get there again without setting a password.
Notifying the user of the change tells them that the password has been changed, and this can happen before the attacker can actually log in and change the notification email.
So, if someone were to get to the site first, the original email to the user will no longer work, as the original password is no longer valid. Also, they'll be notified of the password change.
This provides an opportunity for them to notify sys admins when they show up and find they can not log in to their account.
None of these stop the ability of a person intercepting the email and getting SOME access, but at least it lets the original, vested, user know something is amiss.
Some have stated that both are equivalent - this is not true for following reasons:
1) With reset link if attacker has access to email and consequently uses reset link to change password, they will alert user even if the actual reset email and notifications are deleted by attacker. With mailing password if user requests reset and attacker sees the random password (even much later), then attacker can access user's account on your site without alerting user.
2) Also if you mail a password the user may be tempted to re-use the password on other sites and attacker with access to email has access to other sites even if the other sites were not vulnerable to account take over via account recovery.
With both random password sent in email and reset link, if attacker controls user's email, they have access to user's account. What you can do in this case, depends on how many handles on the user you have - for example, if you have their primary and alternate email address, then you should send notifications to both email accounts when reset is requested and used or if they have a phone, you could send them a text in addition to email, etc. You can monitor usage itself but that is harder.
A couple of other issues:
Can the link be used multiple times? Apart from expiring and having unpredictable value (with attached MAC so it can be verified without server state), you may want to have an internal alert go off if an attempt is made to reset password on an account multiple times (register success/failure, remote ip address, timestamp, etc) and abort after first and put the account in some inactive state.
It would be a good idea to see how much abuse is happening to see if you need more defense mechanisms to prevent account takeovers via your account recovery flows (depends on the value of an account).
Also very important in this case to keep up-to-date on email addresses and other contact information if you can (email addresses do get recycled when not used) and how email address or other such information can be updated/added and notifications.
As always make sure your notifications (text, link, landing page) don't make it easy for phishers.
Some of these issues of course may not be very relevant unless you have a large site.
Send them a link so they can later reset their password. This forces them to confirm somewhat its actually their account they're resetting the password for. If you reset the password without sending an email, anyone can log in to the site and reset anyone else's password. This creates a denial of service type vulnerability.
Although I may be repeating some answers, I feel compelled to respond because we recently had some issues with faulty password recovery tools. One of my coworker's personal accounts was compromised which allowed our google hosted domain apps to be compromised. Due to undeleted plaintext passwords and stupid password recovery questions that were googleable other accounts were compromised as well.
Suffice it to say, I am a strong adherent to emailed links that expire after 4 hours. I sat there for 4 hours logging into one of our accounts after receiving the link making sure it was still uncompromised. 24-48 hours would be waaaay too long to have to do that. 4 hours was too long. A randomly generated password that the user is required to change upon next login is second best, but it is completely dependent on the user actually logging in. The password is changed permanently, whereas if the user does nothing with the link, the password will not be reset.
There is no perfect solution against a dedicated individual who wants to compromise your system. There are better solutions than others.
Extending from bobince's solution... Here user is required to reenter userId and token on password reset page.
On request for reset password page
urserId = Input userId
token = Randomly generated token (or one time password)
tokenExpire = Decide token expiry date/time
Store in DB tokenExpiry for this urserId
urlToken= MD5 hash value of (urserId + token + tokenExpire)
pwdRestURL = server pwd reset url + "?urlToken=" + urlToken
Send above generated URL and make sure you do not
include either of userId or token in email
Display token to user (This is to be used on password reset page)
.
On password reset page (using above pwdRestURL URL)
urlToken = Token from URL request
userId = Input userId
token = Input token
tokenExpiry = tokenExpiry from DB for this user
resetToken = MD5 hash value of (urserId + token + tokenExpire)
IF
resetToken == urlToken
AND tokenExpiry for user is valid
THEN
Clear tokenExpiry
Allow user to change password
ELSE
Display Error
END IF
.
Advantages of above approach:
Even if email is some how exposed in
network, no one can reset password
without knowing the userId and token.
Token has an expiry period
No clear test personal information is
relayed over email
i agree with will's process.
however if you only choose between the options you have given, although both options are essentially the same in that you're sending information via email, i think the latter is a more common method.
if a hacker was to request a new password, the user's old password would no longer work. at least with the latter option it doesn't actually change any user details.
Everybody except for ceeyajoz is using flawed logic. Its hard to think about security.
Both cases use of email which is in plain text. Both are equally insecure when email gets hacked.
It doesn't matter if the URL expires since the email is hacked the hacker can just request for another password reset URL. If the temporary password has changed, the hacker could just request a new one. Either way you are screwed.
So I say just send the password, this way its one less step for the user to pick a new one.
EDIT
When I said "send the password" it was in the context of the OP where you send a new random password.
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I'm looking for the best method to implement a "forgot password" feature.
I come out with 2 ideas:
When user click on forgot password, the user is required to key in the username, email and maybe date of birth or last name. Then a mail with temporary password will be sent to the user email account. The user uses the temporary password to login and resets his password.
Similar, but the email would contain a link to let the user reset his password.
Or anyone can suggest me a better and secure way? I'm also thinking to send the temporary password or link, force the user to reset the password within 24 hour, or else the temporary password or link will not be usable. How to do that?
Update: revised in May 2013 for a better approach
The user enters his username and hits "forgot password". I also recommend the option of entering the email address instead of the username, because usernames are sometimes forgotten too.
The system has a table password_change_requests with the columns ID, Time and UserID. When the new user presses the button, a record is created in the table. The Time column contains the time when the user pressed the "Forgot Password" button. The ID is a string. A long random string is created (say, a GUID) and then hashed like a password (which is a separate topic in and of itself). This hash is then used as the 'ID' in the table.
The system sends an email to the user which contains a link in it. The link also contains the original ID string (before the hashing). The link will be something like this: http://www.mysite.com/forgotpassword.jsp?ID=01234567890ABCDEF. The forgotpassword.jsp page should be able to retrieve the ID parameter. Sorry, I don't know Java, so I can't be more specific.
When the user clicks the link in the email, he is moved to your page. The page retrieves the ID from the URL, hashes it again, and checks against the table. If such a record is there and is no more than, say, 24 hours old, the user is presented with the prompt to enter a new password.
The user enters a new password, hits OK and everyone lives happily ever after... until next time!
It all depends on your site and the level of security that you're trying to achieve but the basic process for a web app goes something like the following:
The user navigates to the 'forgot my password' page and enters their username or email (whichever is unique) to request a password reset.
Optionally at this stage you can confirm the request by asking for additional information such as the answer to a predefined security question or their date of birth etc. This extra level stops users receiving emails they didn't request.
Look up the user's account. Save a temporary password (usually a GUID) and timestamp against the account record. Send an email to the user containing the temporary password.
The user either clicks on the link containing the temporary password and the user's identifier in the email or navigates to the 'forgot my password' page and copy & pastes the temporary password and their identifier. The user enters their new password and confirms it.
Look up the user's record and if the current time is within a specified time limit (e.g. 1 hour) of the timestamp saved in step 2 then hash and save the new password. (Obviously only if the temporary passwords match!). Delete the temporary GUID and timestamp.
The principal here is that the user is emailed a temporary password that let's them change their password. The originally stored password (it should be hashed!) is never changed to a temporary password in case the user remembers it.
The original password will never be displayed to the user as it should be hashed and unknown.
Note this process relies entirely on the security of the user's email account. So it depends on the level of security your wish to achieve. This is usually enough for most sites/apps.
Troy Hunt makes some excellent points in his article, Everything you ever wanted to know about building a secure password reset feature. The most relevant excerpts are:
[T]here are two common approaches:
Generate a new password on the server and email it
Email a unique URL which will facilitate a reset process
Despite plenty of guidance to the contrary, the first point is really not where we want to be. The problem with doing this is that it means a persistent password – one you can go back with and use any time – has now been sent over an insecure channel and resides in your inbox.
...
But there’s one more big problem with the first approach in that it makes the malicious lockout of an account dead simple. If I know the email address of someone who owns an account at a website then I can lock them out of it whenever I please simply by resetting their password; it’s denial of service attack served up on a silver platter! This is why a reset is something that should only happen after successfully verifying the right of the requestor to do so.
When we talk about a reset URL, we’re talking about a website address which is unique to this specific instance of the reset process.
...
What we want to do is create a unique token which can be sent in an email as part of the reset URL then matched back to a record on the server alongside the user’s account thus confirming the email account owner is indeed the one attempting to reset the password. For example, the token may be “3ce7854015cd38c862cb9e14a1ae552b” and is stored in a table alongside the ID of the user performing the reset and the time at which the token was generated (more on that in a moment). When the email is sent out, it contains a URL such as “Reset/?id=3ce7854015cd38c862cb9e14a1ae552b” and when the user loads this, the page checks for the existence of the token and consequently confirms the identity of the user and allows the password to be changed.
...
The other thing we want to do with a reset URL is to time limit the token so that the reset process must be completed within a certain duration, say within an hour.
...
Finally, we want to ensure that this is a one-time process. Once the reset process is complete, the token should be deleted so that the reset URL is no longer functional. As with the previous point, this is to ensure an attacker has a very limited window in which they can abuse the reset URL. Plus of course the token is no longer required if the reset process has completed successfully.
He makes many more good points about avoiding information leaks, CAPTCHAs, two-factor authentication, and of course the basic best practices like password hashing. I think it's important to note that I disagree with Troy on the usefulness of security questions, preferring Bruce Schneier's skepticism of the practice:
The point of all these questions is the same: a backup password. If you forget your password, the secret question can verify your identity so you can choose another password or have the site e-mail your current password to you. It's a great idea from a customer service perspective -- a user is less likely to forget his first pet's name than some random password -- but terrible for security. The answer to the secret question is much easier to guess than a good password, and the information is much more public.
I'll go with:
Ask user for email, check email is registered
Generate GUID, and send it to that email
Do not reset password yet
User clicks link, and then have to enter new pass
Reset password only after user is in your site, and have clicked reset button after typing new pass.
Make that GUID expirable within a short time period to make it safer.
When you are sending any information via email, it won't be secure. There are too many ways someone can get it. It would be child's play for a skilled hacker looking to steal your information.
Refrain from sending any personal information like passwords and income information via email as it can become VERY EMBARRASSING for you and your organization if such information was leaked or stolen. Think about security seriously. It just takes that one incident for all the bricks to fall.
As for password retrieval, thoroughly read Forgot Password Best Practices.
The bottom line is that an application
following best practices should allow
a user to reset his own password.
Personal security questions should be
used. The application should not send
email, display passwords, nor set any
temporary passwords.
EDIT: Updated link
As said, it depends on the level of security required, however, if you need a higher level, some novel solutions I have seen include;
Displaying half of the temporary password when the user's identity has been confirmed (security question, email address etc.) then the other half being sent to the email account. If the email account has been compromised, it is unlikely that the same person has also managed to perform a man-in-the middle attack. (Seen on UK Goverment Gateway)
Confirming identity via email and another medium - for example a code sent via text to a registered mobile. (Seen on eBay / PayPal)
For somewhere in between these two extremes implementing security questions may be the way to go as mentioned by DaveG.
If you include an email address with the registration. The "forget password" button sends an email to that email address. It ensures that the information is send to a trusted email.
(Unless the database is hacked, but then nothing is safe).
I would enforce unique email addresses across the accounts.
Then it is a simple matter of sending a link to a temporary page that allows the person to change their password. (allow 24 hours or less)
The user's email account is the weakest link in this scenario.
Here are three very good links that provide information on password resets:
http://jtauber.com/blog/2006/03/20/account_management_patterns/
(Don't let users confirm using GET):http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=106&thread=152805&start=15&msRange=15
http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/archives/docs/PasswordRecovery.pdf
Hope that helps. They sure helped me understand the issue.
Never email a password to the user. Even if it is auto-generated. Best approach (recommend and used by SANS and others):
On the forgot password page, ask
the email/user id and a NEW password
from the user.
Email a link to the stored email
for that account with an activation
link.
When the user clicks on that link,
enable the new password.
If he doesn't click the link within 24 hours or so, disable the link (so that it does not change the password anymore).
Never change the password without the user consent. It means do not email a new password just because someone clicked on the forgot password link and figured out the account name.