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LinearArray@programming.dev

Mitigating attacks based on knowing the length of a Windows Hello PIN - The Old New Thing (devblogs.microsoft.com)

submitted 8 months ago by Kissaki@programming.dev to c/security@programming.dev

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Describes considerations of convenience and security of auto-confirmation while entering a numeric PIN - which leads to information disclosure considerations.

An attacker can use this behavior to discover the length of the PIN: Try to sign in once with some initial guess like “all ones” and see how many ones can be entered before the system starts validating the PIN.

Is this a problem?

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[–] anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 8 months ago

Knowing the length of a random pin/password is roughly as valuable as knowing one of the characters, if it's a concern just make it two longer and you have just improved security.

I don't know how that applies to non-random pins/password.