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Password Spaces Bug

boyska edited this page Nov 2, 2011 · 11 revisions

Tomb 1.0 has a bug. A VERY GRAVE BUG. Passwords containing odd characters where badly interpreted: this means that if you password was I am 12!! perfectly 7^!@^#38123 secure, it could have been understood by tomb as I. yes, it was "splitted" at the first odd character. And yes, you thought to have a really great passphrase. Instead, you were using a single character one. Try it yourself, even with an old release of tomb. You might be able to open your tomb using just I as password. Now, this bug has been fixed. This, however, won't fix the tomb that you created and used. You need to create a new one, move the content, then securely delete the old tomb and the old key.

That's my case! what should I do now?

If you still use tomb 1.0, you have to do it the hard way. Otherwise, use tomb passwd (see below)

The hard way

Well, actually not that hard.

  • create a new tomb, and use a password with no spaces
  • move the content from the old to the new one
  • WIPE the old tomb and, most importantly, the old key (actually, wiping the key shoudl be enough). Please note that you shouldn't just delete the file; you have to securely delete it. There are lots of tools that can do it, altough their effectiveness is debated, especially on journaling filesystems, like ext3/ext4. You can check wipe, srm. shred

Note that, if you have copies of your old key, you should wipe them as well

Passwd

We are working on the introduction of a tomb subcommand to change password to your key. It has NOT yet been merged in mainline however. The usage should be tomb passwd $keyfile

And be similar to the traditional passwd unix command: ask the old password, then confirm the new one two times.

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