And sure, in theory your hashing browser-side could break if you do that. Depending on how much text the user pastes in. But at that point, it’s no longer your problem but the browser’s. 🦹
Why would you not hash in the browser. Doing so makes sure the plaintext password never even gets to the server while still providing the same security.
You could salt it. Distributing a unique salt doesn’t help attackers much. Salt is for preventing precomputing attacks against a whole database. Attacking one password hash when you know the salt is still infeasible.
It’s one of those things in security where there’s no particular reason to give your attacker information, but if you’ve otherwise done your job, it won’t be a big deal if they do.
You don’t hash in the browser because it doesn’t help anything.
It helps against the server being able to read the password, so a bad actor (either the website itself or after a hack) could read your password. Which isn’t bad if you’re using good password hygiene with random passwords, but that sadly is not the norm.
Because then the hash is the password. Someone could just send the hash instead of trying to find a password that gets the correct hash. You can’t trust the client that much.
You can hash the password on both sides to make it work though.
Per your edit, you’re misunderstanding what Bitwarden does and why it’s different than normal web site password storage.
Bitwarden is meant to not have any insight into your stored passwords what so ever. Bitwarden never needs to verify that the passwords you’ve stored match your input later on. The password you type into Bitwarden to unlock it is strictly for decrypting the database, and that only happens client side. Bitwarden itself never needs to even get the master password on the server side (except for initial setup, perhaps). It’d be a breach of trust and security if they did. Their system only needs to store encrypted passwords that are never decrypted or matched on their server.
Typical website auth isn’t like that. They have to actually match your transmitted password against what’s in their database. If you transmitted the hashed password from the client and a bad actor on the server intercepted it, they could just send the hashed password and the server would match it as usual.
It doesn’t matter too much. It’s well past the point where fully random passwords are impossible to brute force in this universe. Even well conceived passphrases won’t get that long. If you’re really bothered by it, you can sha256 the input before feeding it to bcrypt/scrypt, but it doesn’t really matter.
wouldn’t you then just break it up into chunks of 72 bytes, hash them individually, and concatenate the hashes? And if that’s still too long, split the hash into 72 byte chunks and repeat until it’s short enough?
I don’t know the specifics behind why the limit is 72 bytes, but that might be slightly tricky. My understanding of bcrypt is that it generates 2^salt different possible hashes for the same password, and when you want to test an input you have to hash the password 2^salt times to see if any match. So computation times would get very big if you’re combining hashes
If you hash in the browser it means you don’t salt your hash. You should absolutely salt your hash, not doing so makes your hashes very little better than plaintext.
At minimum you need to limit the request size to avoid DOS attacks and such. But obviously that would be a much larger limit than anyone would use for a password.
The problem is that you (hopefully) hash the passwords, so they all end up with the same length.
And sure, in theory your hashing browser-side could break if you do that. Depending on how much text the user pastes in. But at that point, it’s no longer your problem but the browser’s. 🦹
Why are you hasing in the browser?
Also, what hashing algorithm would break with large input?
Why would you not hash in the browser. Doing so makes sure the plaintext password never even gets to the server while still providing the same security.
Because then that means you don’t salt your hashes, or that you distribute your salt to the browser for the hash. That’s bad.
You could salt it. Distributing a unique salt doesn’t help attackers much. Salt is for preventing precomputing attacks against a whole database. Attacking one password hash when you know the salt is still infeasible.
It’s one of those things in security where there’s no particular reason to give your attacker information, but if you’ve otherwise done your job, it won’t be a big deal if they do.
You don’t hash in the browser because it doesn’t help anything.
It helps against the server being able to read the password, so a bad actor (either the website itself or after a hack) could read your password. Which isn’t bad if you’re using good password hygiene with random passwords, but that sadly is not the norm.
It doesn’t. It just means the attacker can send the hash instead of the password.
For that particular website yes, but a salted client side hash is worthless on a different website.
Edit: plus even unsalted it would only work if the algorithm is the same and less iterations are done
With comments like this all over public security forums, it’s no wonder we have so many password database cracks.
Because then the hash is the password. Someone could just send the hash instead of trying to find a password that gets the correct hash. You can’t trust the client that much.
You can hash the password on both sides to make it work though.
Per your edit, you’re misunderstanding what Bitwarden does and why it’s different than normal web site password storage.
Bitwarden is meant to not have any insight into your stored passwords what so ever. Bitwarden never needs to verify that the passwords you’ve stored match your input later on. The password you type into Bitwarden to unlock it is strictly for decrypting the database, and that only happens client side. Bitwarden itself never needs to even get the master password on the server side (except for initial setup, perhaps). It’d be a breach of trust and security if they did. Their system only needs to store encrypted passwords that are never decrypted or matched on their server.
Typical website auth isn’t like that. They have to actually match your transmitted password against what’s in their database. If you transmitted the hashed password from the client and a bad actor on the server intercepted it, they could just send the hashed password and the server would match it as usual.
bcrypt has a maximum password length of 72 bytes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt#Maximum_password_length
Damm, I legit didn’t knew there bcrypt had a length limit! Thank you for another reason not to use bcrypt
Scrypt has the same limit, FWIW.
It doesn’t matter too much. It’s well past the point where fully random passwords are impossible to brute force in this universe. Even well conceived passphrases won’t get that long. If you’re really bothered by it, you can sha256 the input before feeding it to bcrypt/scrypt, but it doesn’t really matter.
wouldn’t you then just break it up into chunks of 72 bytes, hash them individually, and concatenate the hashes? And if that’s still too long, split the hash into 72 byte chunks and repeat until it’s short enough?
I don’t know the specifics behind why the limit is 72 bytes, but that might be slightly tricky. My understanding of bcrypt is that it generates 2^salt different possible hashes for the same password, and when you want to test an input you have to hash the password 2^salt times to see if any match. So computation times would get very big if you’re combining hashes
If you hash in the browser it means you don’t salt your hash. You should absolutely salt your hash, not doing so makes your hashes very little better than plaintext.
There’s nothing stopping a browser from salting a hash. Salts don’t need to be kept secret, but it should be a new random salt per user.
At minimum you need to limit the request size to avoid DOS attacks and such. But obviously that would be a much larger limit than anyone would use for a password.
What’s a sensible limit. 128 bytes? Maybe 64?
I’d say 128 is understandable, but something like 256 or higher should be the limit. 64, however, is already bellow my default in bitwarden
Also rate of the requests. A normal user isn’t sending a 1 MiB password every second