Basic cyber security says that passwords should be encrypted and hashed, so that even the company storing them doesn’t know what the password is. (When you log in, the site performs the same encrypting and hashing steps and compares the results) Otherwise if they are hacked, the attackers get access to all the passwords.

I’ve noticed a few companies ask for specific characters of my password to prove who I am (eg enter the 2nd and 9th character)

Is there any secure way that this could be happening? Or are the companies storing my password in plain text?

  • lando55@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This means that if you log in and get keylogged/shoulder surfed etc they don’t get the full pin. The next time you login you will get asked for different characters.

    This seems somehow worse than simply requiring the same few characters each time, since they would either have to store the complete passwords in plaintext, or compute and store the hash for every permutation of 2-3 characters, which is wildly inefficient. You’d also be susceptible to leaking your password if for some reason you are under long term surveillance, since at some point you would presumably have provided all of the characters making up the password.