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France outlaws hashed passwords... (yro.slashdot.org)

195 points by Tharkun ↗ HN
Slightly dramatic, slashdot style, but it's an extremely disturbing development nonetheless. Especially considering data retention has already been ruled as being unconstitutional in a bunch of EU countries.

115 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] thread
michael_dorfman
That's a pretty bad misreading of the situation. There's nothing in the law, as far as I know, outlawing hashed passwords-- just that the passwords need to be able to be handed over to the proper authorities upon request. A hashed password should work just fine, as long as law enforcement can use that to gain access to the system.

In short: there's plenty of reasons to be against this law without constructing new outrages.

JoachimSchipper
Are you really sure that hashed passwords are not outlawed? They're pretty specific about handing over passwords instead of having, for instance, a "police-only" password that gives access to every account.
ernesth
Directly from the law, «Les données mentionnées aux 3° et 4° ne doivent être conservées que dans la mesure où les personnes les collectent habituellement.»

The password (as well as full name, postal address, pseudonym, phone number) only needs to be kept if it is collected. So you must keep the password (and be able to give it upon request) only in the case you already store it.

JonnieCache
You cannot gain access to a system with the hashed passwords, unless you modified the system to accept them. In that case you could just modify the system to not require a password at all. In fact, that is in a sense what you would be doing anyway.

It does outlaw hashed passwords in practice.

EDIT: as others have pointed out, you could simply store the plaintext passwords in another file with greater security, and have hashed ones in the DB. An even better option would be simply to get the hell out of france.

Or, start a consulting business in france to help people comply with this, and rake it in.

praptak
It strongly depends on the wording of the law and on the usual million things that affects how laws are interpreted. Maybe just providing a freshly generated password that gives access to the account in question is enough to satisfy this law?
tlrobinson
Couldn't you simply change the app to accept the password hashed or unhashed? e.x. change

    ... WHERE user.password = hash(input)
to

    ... WHERE user.password = hash(input) OR user.password = input
Or was your point that this would eliminate the benefits of using an adaptive hash like bcrypt to slow down brute forcing?
JonnieCache
Yes, but this would mean you were storing the unhashed passwords in the DB. When your DB is compromised, everyone's password is exposed, likely along with their email. In this world of frequent password reuse, that is pretty much game over.
verysimple
I don't know why your answer was downvoted, you are spot on.
mattmanser
No he's absolutely not, there's a massive difference between having someone's password that's been reused on X number of sites and having a hashed version of a password that's only valid on one site.

Also if you wanted to make it secure you could restrict hash passwords to work only from certain IP addresses so you either have to be using a company internal machine or say the IP addresses from a police station.

JonnieCache
>No he's absolutely not

He was referring to my rebuttal, which was initially downvoted for some reason.

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profquail
In the example above, the ".password" field is the hashed password. I think 'tlrobinson' was trying to point out that sites only have to keep plaintext passwords if that's what they're given. If, when you first signed up for a site that uses tlrobinson's technique, you provided the hash of your password (instead of your password itself), then the site would never have access to the plaintext (but you'd be able to use the plaintext to log on at a later date since the SQL query checks the ".password" field against hash(input).)
tlrobinson
Yes, close, but not exactly what I meant. The password would still be provided in plaintext upon registration, but the application would immediately hash and store it. Then the user can login with their password, which gets hashed and compared to the hashed password in the database. Alternatively the hash can be handed over if required and also used as the password since we also compare the unhashed input to the hashed stored password.
tlrobinson
No, you misunderstood. My example was poor, the password in the database is hashed:

    ... WHERE user.hashed_password = hash(input) OR user.hashed_password = input
So the user can provide their password which gets hashed and compared to the stored hash, OR the hash can be given to law enforcement if required and can be used in place of the real password.

This solves the problem of passwords being stored in plaintext (indeed a problem with frequent password reuse) while apparently getting around this silly French law.

Sure if the database is compromised anyone will be able to login to anyone's account, but the database is compromised so who cares?

kwantam
You could do this without allowing the hashes to act as passwords directly by establishing a "skeleton key" approach:

    WHERE user.password = hash(input) OR hash(user.password + skeleton_key) = input
If the police want to log into a user's account without their password, they combine the hash of their password with the skeleton key, hash that, and submit it as the password.

Of course, now you have to keep skeleton_key a secret. Presumably you wouldn't store it in the same database as the password hashes, so losing the database wouldn't immediately grant access to everyone's account.

I'm not claiming this is particularly secure. In fact, it's kind of the opposite: it's intentionally adding a back door to your authentication system. But at least it's a door rather than a gaping hole :)

gokhan
How will they be able to login with the hash without modifying the application? If that's the case, they'll also be able modify (or force to author to modify) the system to login without the password, so it's irrelevant to request the password.
cmontgomeryb
But law enforcement _wouldn't_ be able to use the hashed password to gain access to the system, would they? Otherwise there would be no advantage to hashing over storing plaintext. Am I misunderstanding you?
EwanToo
I agree this law doesn't seem to outlaw hashed passwords, it simply means that you need to store 2 copies of the password - one hashed, and one in plain text.

It's totally legal to store the hashed value with your live database as normal to provide authentication, and store the plain text version in a write only file on a separate system to try and give some additional level of security. This isn't a great solution, but it does provide hashed passwords for regular work, and plain text for when the police ask for it.

It's obviously a pretty stupid law, but to say it "outlaws" hashed passwords is just nonsense.

IDisposableHero
I agree this law doesn't seem to outlaw hashed passwords, it simply means that you need to store 2 copies of the password - one hashed, and one in plain text.

You are splitting hairs. It outlaws passwords where only the (salted) hash and not the plaintext is stored, which is the whole point of what's commonly known as "hashed passwords".

store the hashed value with your live database ... and store the plain text version in ... a separate system

Call that seperate system "the moneypot". I'm tempted to suggest that people just try that and see how that works out for them, given the inevitablity of failures of security and vigilance. But for the sake of the rest of us, let's not.

EwanToo
I didn't say it was a smart law, but I'm also not splitting hairs.

If someone has that level of control over your system to access a write only file on a separate secured system, make a copy and extract it somewhere else, they probably also have enough access to insert a piece of code into your authentication system to dump all the plaintext passwords to a separate file as people login over time.

The message remains the same for all users regardless of this law - Don't reuse passwords, you can't trust their security.

IDisposableHero
I'll be more specific about failures of security and vigilance: "separate secured system" aren't always as seperate and secured as they should be. Assume that all computers can connect to the internet these days unless specifically configured otherwise, and data gets copied, and copies get left lying around. e.g. the classic "left the laptop on a train" http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/exclusive-new-... / "cd got lost in the mail" problem.
JonnieCache
Ultimately, if two systems need to exchange data in any way, even in one direction only, they cannot truly be described as separate.
IDisposableHero
I'm also not splitting hairs.

of course you aren't. We know this because you say you aren't. What you are is making a nuanced distinction between what you mean when you say "stores hashed passwords" and what is commonly meant by that.

yannickmahe
Couldn't you, in theory, keep hashed passwords, but in case of a request comply by saying: "Ok, we will give you the passwords, but our passwords recovery process will take over X years while we brute force it" ?
fizx
In general, the law frowns upon the sort of pedantic cleverness geeks love.
wladimir
Isn't being a lawyer basically about "pedantic cleverness"? Regarding the details of the law, of course, instead of technical details. But I've always found law extrememly pedantic.

Writing laws and contracts, in a way, seems like trying to make secure software. One has to define everything, and evaluate all possible "attack angles".

gokhan
What if the site is hosted outside France?
wazoox
Then they can't do anything. This law is of abysmal stupidity but everything coming from Sarkozy is made of the same stuff: publicity stunt and utter nonsense.
robryan
So this really hurts French hosting companies more than anything if it eventuates.
wazoox
Most probably the necessary application decrees won't see the light and the law will remain inapplicable. This is the case for half the laws voted by the French parliament anyway.
Natsu
As I understand it, there are people setting up proxying services and whatnot specifically so that they don't have this data and therefore are unable to comply.
skalpelis
Does it really say you cannot at all store hashed passwords, or does it mean just that you have to give the authorities the password for a user account if they ask you to? After all, if they want a password that can access a user's account, they could get that but that doesn't mean that it has to be the exact same password that the user uses, does it?
redthrowaway
How would you implement that? The law requires you be able to give police the user's password, upon request. How would you do that without storing the password in plaintext, somewhere?

The law seems ill-conceived at best. In the best case, it will require every french site to implement a workaround. I'd be willing to bet a great many will simply comply with the law and compromise everyone's security.

skalpelis
Generate another password upon request, store both hashes with the user account and make the user account accessible with both passwords. Not that I condone such snooping, but that isn't that hard of a workaround to implement.
redthrowaway
That doesn't get around the fact that the police would likely want a password in useable form, that is, something they can log in with. If you're storing something in that form, it's functionally plaintext and subject to all of the issues associated therewith. Hashing it then building in a workaround is like putting a deadbolt on your door but leaving your window open. A compromised database would have the same effect with your solution that it would with passwords stored in plaintext.
wladimir
Crazy, stupid law. Reading this, I kind of feel ashamed to be in Europe with them.
JonnieCache
I think a lot of us have been feeling that for a while. This only adds to it.

Well, if it comes to pass it will only last a year or so until the french government realises that every single server in the country has been savagely violated by every enterprising blackhat on the planet. It will start to become a game for bored script kiddies. I can see them on IRC now, "dude, you wanna go root some frenchies?"

Tharkun
I think every European with half a brain is very much ashamed of having anything to do with Europe. The EU advocates privacy on the one hand, and then slaps you in the face with data retention & sends all your financial transactions over to the US without any guarantees of privacy or confidentiality. It claims to be a democratic entity, but as soon as someone disagrees The Commission rears its ugly head and tells you to buzz off.

Bah.

wladimir
Yes, but is there any part of the world better in this regard?

It seems like a data retention arms race is in progress.

piaskal
Everyone seems to be overlooking the privacy issues here. The main problem for me would be that even after I delete my account on some website they will still keep all of my data for one year.
JonnieCache
There is nothing stopping most businesses from doing that at the moment.
eru
In Germany there is. (I don't know the situation in France, but them being in the EU it should not be too different.)
JonnieCache
Thinking about it, in the UK there are laws against this as well. However in practice, I am not confident that such laws are really enforceable. Still, my original claim was probably overstated.
perlgeek
If this ridiculous law goes into effect, and I were to operate a service in France, I'd still keep the hashed passwords in the database.

Then log the plaintext passwords to a different file, encrypted with a public key. The corresponding private key would live on a separate machine (without internet access), and would only be used in cases where it's inevitable.

burgerbrain
A better response would be to bite the bullet and refuse to comply.

Wrap it up nicely if you must, say you've lost the key or something, but the important thing is that you don't lay down to fools.

yannickmahe
According to other sources, you have to pay a fine of 3850 Euros for every time you don't comply to a request. That amount is low enough that the cost/benefit of giving out the passwords is not evidently on the side of complying with the decree. I'm not sure how many companies will rather pay than give out the data.
RuadhanMc
Is that 3850 euros per password?
yannickmahe
Not sure. It's per request, but I'm guessing they only ask for the info of one person at a time.
pmjordan
I wonder if resetting the password counts as complying with the request.
pavel_lishin
They could always pass the cost onto the consumer!
omh
the important thing is that you don't lay down to fools

Is this really a good idea when the fools are the government?

Refusing to comply with actual laws makes it quite likely that you'll be sued or arrested, which isn't a great idea for either a business or a personal project. There are obviously times when civil disobedience is called for, but I don't think this is one of them.

tomjen3
If the government has no power to hurt you, then it seems like an excellent plan.

Once you get to be big enough, you get to bully the government. So get big fast.

mfukar
That's right! Don't give in the illusion of creating a just legal system of government! Be an outlaw!
kmfrk
It's good publicity, too.
eru
If you do that, you might as well only keep the encrypted passwords (plus nonce) around, and dispense with the hash.
bigiain
That's true if you're writing the software from scratch.

If I had to run, say, Wordpress or SMF for a French client, I'd probably do as perlgeek suggests, and just hook the password create/change function to also store a public-key-encrypted version just for law enforcement / compliance purposes, and let the 3rd party software continue to authenticate as normal.

dabeeeenster
I assumed they had outlawed simple hashed passwords as too insecure, but it goes the other way!

Crazy.

rmjb
Yeah, before clicking I was wondering which KDF they've made mandatory, PBKDF2 or bcrypt.
yannickmahe
One of the benefits of being in the EU is that there is a higher authority than the government who can overturn stuff like that. I'm not a legal expert, but seeing as how the latest constitutionnal questions in France went, I'm pretty sure this decree will not stand.
thecabinet
But that's just another government. What makes Brussels more likely to get it right than Paris?
JonnieCache
In short, the EU is deeply boring. This means its various machinations are covered less by the various national newspapers, leaving them to make decisions in peace.

When I say "covered less" I mean in the hysterical, think-of-the-children way that national politics tends to be reported. It is still obviously covered.

ugh
It's really comical how the tone changes between news segments about national legislation and EU legislation. That's at least my experience in Germany.

Not that this additional way of making laws isn't a double edged sword. A common European market is in my view a great idea and it is very clear that laws are necessary to implement such a market, treaties alone won't do. But there is always the danger that the EU tries to do too much or that battles against bad legislation have to be fought again and again.

ckuehne
Of course the question arises: who will overturn the "overturner"?
Tyrannosaurs
I'm not sure what basis the EU would have to strike this down though?
fmw
IANAL, but if I were I'd argue that this law doesn't comply with article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights[0]. There is room for exception in that article (e.g. for national security), but that doesn't take away the fundamental right of privacy. If this were to come before a court, the judge would try to balance the two rights (right to privacy and the right to be safe from child molesters or what not) to determine which of them should prevail in this situation. An important consideration is the fact that the aim of the government can mostly be achieved in a more practical way in this case (i.e. allowing them access to the data, without giving them a password), so I think that this law stands a good chance to be shot down.

A good example of a case involving privacy and the margin of appreciation of a national lawmaker is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_and_Marper_v_United_Kingdom

P.S. To explain the legal situation to Americans: international conventions and particularly the European laws (like the aforementioned ECHR, which has a special court that accepts cases from a national level that want to appeal on the basis of the ECHR) are more important than national laws. It is a bit like the Constitution in the United States.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conve...

photophotoplasm
I can also see some disadvantages to ceding your sovereignty to a not-entirely-democratic supranational bureaucracy.

Hopefully it all works out for Europe but I hope to God my country never goes down that route.

eru
The supranational bureaucracy is put in place by some mostly-democratic nation states.

It's not like you can vote for judges on the supreme court in America directly, either.

andr
The EU's ability to intervene into local politics is not as direct as you think. Every EU law needs to be signed by individual countries before it's valid in there. Only after the law is signed and the countries break it, can they be held accountable by the EU. So if the EU was to act, it would have to pass a law (which will go in effect in a few years), then get France to sign it, and later sue them.
estel
Presumably you're excluding higher courts such as the ECHR? Not that I think the vastly expanded role the ECHR currently fulfils is a good thing (it handles orders of magnitude more cases than it ought).
fmw
This isn't entirely correct. The basic idea that countries are only bound by treaties they agreed to (or laws that flow from those treaties, e.g. if they give the EU parliament legislative power in some areas) is right. However, some laws might be in breach of existing treaties (like the ECHR) that the countries previously signed. That might very well be the case i.c. If so, the (part of the) law that is in breach is void until the treaty is changed (which is unlikely in most cases).
dexen
The basic question is, does the law require giving authorities the password verbatim, or rather, giving them access to account's data (perhaps including fake authentication as the user, but without use of user's password)? There may well be mis-understanding in the early reporting.

If password verbatim is required, well, game over, the law will be shot down in record time. If, on the other hand, merely access to the account is required, that's just a small feature to be implemented -- ``allow accounts of authorities authenticating as any plain user without users' passwords'' (which is still terribly bad, open to abuse etc.).

In any case, the law (as reported in the article) sounds like a failure of democracy to me -- not something one wants his representative to vote for.

contactdick
I wander if companies like google will soon start offering services where you can choose what countries they store your data in.
ErrantX
French politics simply does not understand the internet. And they are uninterested in privacy or security. They "lost it" in my eyes with their LOPPSI internet filtering laws (which they heavily promoted with nonsense about child sex offenders) [1]

This law (in general) is going from the sublime to the ridiculous.

1. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_by_country#...

hoggle
Although I consider myself a Francophile I have to say that the Sarkozy government really seems to be out of control these days, of course the same is true here in Austria as well as in Germany.

We need common sense & neutral specialists in control. This world is clearly becoming far too complex for the electable caste.

doe88
I can assure you I live in France I'm sick of this government, but what's worry me even more is that I find to some extent it represents quite well the current mind of thought of the majority of the population. Peoples are becoming more and more intolerant, rejecting every problem on illegal immigration,... I digress... Sorry, I'm tired.
MediaBehavior
Nice phrase coinage, since google search says,

"No results found for "electable caste"."

- avoiding the pejorative-sounding 'ilk.' - but conveying the realm of demagogues who legislate unintended consequences along with their campaigns to save humanity from (depravity, etc.).

maw
We need common sense & neutral specialists in control. This world is clearly becoming far too complex for the electable caste.

How do you reconcile those two sentences? As I read them, they directly contradict each other, even if by "electable caste" you mean the good looking and charismatic crooks who tend to get elected.

praptak
User's actual password is of very limited use to enforcement officials. Just provide the short "login history" to the user at each login and they'll have a chance to notice strange accesses of their account.
tomelders
consider the fact that most people use the same password for most of their logins, and those passwords become extremely useful.
praptak
True, with the same caveat as above. Such accesses will probably be visible.
dagw
That was my thought as well. I doubt the simply want to be able to log onto your forum or mail account since they can get everything they want via a simple warrant. However imagine you find a USB drive with an encrypted file on it. Now all you have to do is get all the suspects passwords from all the sites he has accounts on and try those passwords with some variants and chances are one will decrypt the file.
ichilton
The irony is that you could seriously argue that it should be illegal to host a site which DOESN'T hash the passwords!
tlrobinson
We just need a couple very large web services to block France until they realize how stupid this is.

Google, can you take one for the team? Thanks.

eru
I don't have high hopes. Google went to China after all.
eru
What do you do, if your users don't have a password? (E.g. public key login of ssh?)
alexandros
So that would mean that using ready-made software that uses proper hashing (Simple Machines Forum comes to mind) would become illegal in France.. Interesting times.
colinhowe
I guess the intent behind this law is to make it easy to get to the other accounts on different services that a user might have due to people using the same password for lots of things.

So, upon receiving a request for this you could generate a random password and give that to them (as well as set the user account to this password). They have no way of proving that this isn't their password :)

snes
Sites should have different hash or crypto methods. E.g. adding some random text infront of the pw before encrypting.
shabda
Doesnt this law in essence ban Wordpress, Django, Drupal and any CMS/Framework with a sane password mechanism?
ricotijsen
it's a misunderstanding, they meant 'haché'
ig1
I'm sorry but this reaction is just stupid and based on wild speculation. I'll bet you $100 right now that France will not prosecute anyone for using hashed password.

What people should be concerned about is the impact this will have on online anonymity, which this law is actually a direct threat to.

keyle
How much is this silly thing going to hurt hosting companies in France? Think about it, I'd rather hash passwords and host my site in Belgium than host locally. The government is hurting its own country!
drdaeman
From /. comments:

> I suspect the OP did not verify the exact wording. The law requires retention of (among other things) "mot de passe ou données permettant de le vérifier ou de le modifie" (password or data to verify it or change it) so it seems that it would be enough to store the password hash and/or do a password reset when demanded by the law enforcement guys.

dansingerman
Which, while pretty poor from a privacy point of view, is entirely reasonable from a technical point of view.
beedogs
Once a court order is involved, any expectation of privacy basically goes out the window anyway. This law seems to just stipulate that a simple mechanism should exist to aid law enforcement.
GrandMasterBirt
The only thing about this whole situation is that what if a company is based in the US? Does it mean that the company is now ip-blocked from france if they don't conform?

Problem with non-international laws is like the US State dissallowing adult content to be served to minors, that becomes a world-wide law not only localized. Hence why the internet needs an international governing body to truly control because it is global, a concept never before seen in history.

tonfa
In addition to that the decree is not so much about data retention but about what gets transmitted to law enforcement. About the passwords, it also specifies that you don't have to store anything extra, which at least to me doesn't mean you have to suddenly store everything in plain text. Sad to see so much misinformation...
joelhaasnoot
So it's all tempest in a teapot, like so many "scandalous" things that land on HN these days... Being able to change a user's password is quite normal.
5l
I left Slashdot to get away from these kinds of stories. Anything to do with politics especially and most of the time you would read the linked article or the comments to find the summary was just hysterical nonsense.
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