Meta fined $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of passwords in plaintext
therecord.mediaEuropean regulators fined Meta for an engineering mistake that the social media giant first reported in 2019.
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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You should never be sending passwords to a server. That is really bad practice. The right answer is to use cryptography to verify the client knows the password.
Client side verification is just security by obscurity, which gains you very little.
If someone is capable of MITM attacking a user and fetching a password mid-transit to the server over HTTPS, they are surely capable of popping open devtools and reverse engineering your cryptographic code to either a) uncover the original password, or b) just using the encrypted credentials directly to authenticate with your server without ever having known the password in the first place
That assumes that an adversary has control of the browser. The big reason you don’t want to send passwords over https is that some organizations have custom certs setup. It is better to just not send the password at all.
No it doesn’t, if they intercept an encrypted password over HTTPS they can resend the request from their own browser to get access to your account
What is the problem with that? The password is secure and only shared between you and the site you are intending to communicate with. Even if you sent an encrypted password, they wrote the client side code used to generate it, so they can revert it back to its plaintext state server side anyways
How would you verify it then?
If not sending plaintext passwords was best practice then why do no sites follow this? You are literally posting to a site (Lemmy) that sends plaintext passwords in its request bodies to log-in