Many states have “open information” laws which mandate public disclosure of business proposals posted to state firms. Whenever a state collection or university requests proposals for library systems or databases, the vendor reactions can be analyzed and obtained. When I am at the library software business, it was routine to use these laws to do “competitor intelligence”.
These disclosures could reveal the internal workings of proprietary merchant software which implicate information privacy and security. Consider for example, this obtain “eResources for Minitex”. To provide a framework for this question, you need to know simply a little bit of security and cryptography. I’ll admit to having written code 15 years back that saved passwords as plain text.
This is an unhealthy move to make, because if someone were to get unauthorized usage of the computer where in fact the passwords were stored, they might have a large list of passwords. As a total result, web designers are actually strongly admonished never to save the passwords as ordinary text message. Doing so in a fresh system is highly recommended negligent and could easily result in liability for the developer if the system security is breached.
Unfortunately many businesses would prefer to risk paying lawyer’s big money to guard themselves should something go wrong then bite the bullet and pay some designers just a little money now to patch in the older systems. To avoid the disclosure of passwords, the existing standard practice is to “salt, and hash” them.
A cryptographic hash function mixes up a password so the password cannot be reconstructed. 865a7e0ddbf35fa6f6a232e0893bea4′. Whenever a user enters their password, the hash of the password is recalculated and set alongside the kept hash to determine whether the password is right. As a result of this strategy, the password can’t be recovered. But it can be reset, and the fact that nobody can recover the security password eliminates a whole bunch of “social engineering” attacks on the security of the service.
Given a LOT of computer power, there are brute drive episodes on the hash, but the easiest strike is to compute the hashes for the most typical passwords. In a big file of passwords, you ought to be in a position to find some accounts that are reachable, with the hashing even. Therefore a “salt” is put into the password prior to the hash is applied.
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Which, of course, is ’52b71cb6d37342afa3dd5b4cc9ab4846′. To strike the salted password file, you’d need to find out that salt. And since every application uses a different salt, each document of salted passwords is totally different. A successful attack using one hashed password file won’t compromise the others. Another standard practice for user-facing security password management is to send passwords unencrypted never. The best way to do this is to use HTTPS, since browser software alerts an individual that their information is secure. Otherwise, any server between your user and the destination server (there might be 20-40 of the for typical web traffic) could read and store the user’s security password. The Minitex RFP covers reference directories.
For this reason, only a little subset of services offered here to libraries are covered. The authentication for these kinds of systems typically don’t depend on an individual making a password; consumer accounts are used to save the full-total results of a search, or even to provide customization features. A Minitex patron may use many of the offered directories without providing any sort of password.
My comment: This is a correct answer. However, the LearningExpress login transmits passwords in the clear over HTTP. My comment: MD5 is the hash algorithm I found in my examples above. It isn’t considered very secure (see feedback). OCLC Firstsearch does not power HTTPS and can send login passwords in the clear. My comment: This just means that no passwords are found in the service. My comment: The individual customization available these days for ReferenceUSA appears at first glance to be done correctly. My comment: Should remember that EBSCOadmin is not just an end-user-facing system.
So if the EBSCO systems were affected only library administrator qualifications would be exposed. My comment: I wonder if EB has an article on network security? My comment: The ProQuest service available through my collection creates passwords over HTTP but uses some client-side encryption. I’ve not evaluated the security of the encryption.
