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I feel bad for the author for publishing this article.

If your (the author) mindset is that "everyone else is an idiot", be it management, or regulators, auditors or some other group that is not your group (engineer?), then unfortunately you have an attitude problem.

If furthermore you maliciously misinterpret the other group, saying "they want us to be compliant, not secure", based on misunderstanding the domain expertise _of your own group_ (!), then you are a liability to your business and should be kept at arms length from external auditors.

Because the author clearly has no clue what he is doing, and based on his technical shortcomings he is speaking down on others who are _actually_ doing their job correctly: the auditors.

Why is the author comparing bcrypt using 32 iterations with sha512crypt with 5000 iterations? Why not increase the sha512crypt iteration count by orders of magnitude if he want the hashcat test to fair equal or better under the testing methodology in use? Why is he using hashcat and basing decisions solely on that tool? Why is he using shacrypt at all and not a a proper KDF, such as PDKDF2, plugging in SHA2?

You're criticizing the author for not adequately understanding the regulatory concerns but letting the regulators off the hook for not adequately understanding the engineering concerns. Frankly the latter feels more important and more beneficial (to everyone) to improve upon.

The author didn't relate how the exact conversation went down. The closest we get is this:

> But the auditors were adamant. They did not care that the approved algorithms were weaker. Nothing would change their decision.

That's the 100% the author's perspective. It's quite possible those auditors were aware of the existence of bcrypt and what it does.

Even so, their personal opinions simply didn't matter. And they, quite likely, tried to point this out to the author. Yes, a stronger algorithm - bcrypt - existed, but as long as it wasn't a formally vetted FIPS approved algorithm, it simply wasn't an option for operational use.

Compliance isn't bad in itself. It's a tool. Compliance is implemented to ensure that large and complex organizations can continue to function as a structured system. It helps ensure accountability, audit-ability, integrity, reliability, sustainability and other "abilities".

There is a trade-off, though, when it comes to day-to-day operations. You simply can't improvise. In a large organisations, that's a good thing, which the author clearly hasn't understood.

While the direct result is that their systems security is now weaker, that same compliance also shields them from any legal repercussions. If those systems get compromised, they can always point to the list of sanctioned algorithms and the oversight. That's how accountability works.

You'll find the freedom and the flexibility to implement your own solutions in smaller organizations. However, that comes at a price: The buck stops at your desk. When something breaks, all eyes will turn to you in order to fix it. And there will be little to hide from.

Of course, I'm well aware that there's more nuance to it. There are plenty of stories on both sides of the aisle were the lack of or very existence of formalisms either saved the day or directly lead to catastrophe. That doesn't imply that one is always better then the other.

The way to approach infosec is, don't trust anyone and verify everything. This is just part of the IT world.

I'm not an auditor, but my impression is they not only don't trust each other, they also hate each other. Auditing is a job for people who don't like other people, which is ok. Just be aware.

I'm going to take flak for this, but I believe it needs to be said. (And for the record, I have been dealing with audits and auditors continuously for the last 5 years. In 2019 I spent 25% of all my working hours directly working on audits or babysitting auditors.)

Auditors are accountants, who secretly harbour dreams of being lawyers. With years of disappointment and self-loathing, they do the human thing: take it on everyone else.

Compliance is in fact not the same as security. Just like our non-technology laws are not equivalent to ethics. Laws exist for many reasons, and change over time as societies ideals and requirements change.

For example, just because we have laws against burglary, it doesn't mean that you can leave your door unlocked. Being "compliant" in no way means you are being secure. This is highly dangerous thinking that many many many organizations are guilty of.

As for the regulators, yes, they care about you being compliant not secure. Just like lawyers care about things being legal, not "right." It's their job to make sure you comply with the law, it's not their job to make sure the law is correct, or that you are doing things in your best interest outside of what the laws say.

Also, just like every law, security compliance regulations do become outdated, in some cases even being actively harmful. For instance, look at how password compliance has been overhauled in the last several years. Previous to this, many people knew based on technical data and research that old password compliance rules were not best practice, or even outright harmful. The auditors didn't care, it wasn't their job to evaluate whether the existing compliance rules were right. Eventually standards bodies caught up, but even today you have some compliance people who won't let go of the old ways.

So in my opinion, the author has a very good and correct point, compliance isn't about being secure. It's necessary to have, like many of our laws and regulations, but it's not the same as security. We should strive that our laws always match outcomes and current understanding of best practices, but there is never a 1:1 equivalence.

Yeah - utterly agree. The point raised in the article is valid - but the correct thing to do isn't to persuade the auditor they are wrong, it's to push FIPS to include bcrypt instead of SHA2 (although as below, this isn't the right answer either - it should use PBKDF2 or similar).

No, the right answer is to push no one on anything, comply with the FIPS standard and suck up the marginally increased probability of a breach. They made the right decision throughout.

You could also consider it a M&M test for both FIPS and the auditor. If they get something this simple wrong, what other issues lay hidden?

FIPS is never going to include bcrypt. Not including things like bcrypt is literally part of the point of FIPS.

Which aspects of bcrypt are you referring to by "things like bcrypt"?

Modern, superior alternatives to standard algorithms and constructions. Canonical example: Curve25519. WireGuard, for instance, will never be FIPS compatible.

How then, can refusing superior alternative be anyone's point? Are you merely calling them overly conservative to the point of incompetence (I'd be tempted to), or is there another aspect to it?

One angle to consider here is that FIPS is informed by whatever NSA knows about cryptography, so not all the evaluation criteria is public. You and I may think djb's inventions are superior, but for example NSA might have an active research project into elliptic curves, and refused to endorse Curve25519 until those results came in.

Don't the drafts for NIST FIPS 186-5 and SP 800-186 both include Curve25519-based algorithms?

They do. This person doesn't know what they're talking about.

The point of FIPS is to provide a set of approved algorithms (and other standards) that are considered to be secure due to thorough analysis. Curve25519 has become widely implemented, and hasn't been broken, and has some advantages over the other NIST-approved curves, so NIST will likely approve it.

Password hashing has been rapidly changing over the last few years. PBKDF2 isn't memory-hard, but can be instantiated with only a FIPS-approved cryptographic hash. Bcrypt is OK, Scrypt has different tradeoffs, Argon2 has different tradeoffs (and even more tweakability with multiple variants), Pufferfish2 is cache-hard instead of just memory hard (so potentially better than any of the only-memory-hard systems), etc. NIST probably don't see any reason to update the standard for a marginal improvement when they can wait for the cryptographic research in the area to stabilize.

There's also a lot of research into ways to avoid having to send passwords to servers in the first place with strong asymmetric password-authenticated key exchange (sAPAKE) algorithms. So NIST might end up standardizing a password-based key derivation function separately from a PAKE system.

Personally I think standards should be updated a bit more frequently than they are, but I can understand NIST's conservative stance here.

Wow, I'm wildly wrong about Curve25519 and FIPS. I should probably not write HN comments in bed immediately after waking up. Thanks for the correction. (Ironically, we had an HN thread almost exactly 1 year ago about the same thing; I'd just refer to my comments there, I guess.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21744469

Incidentally I've noticed the voting bouncing around in this comment but you all should be hammering it, it is a supremely dumb comment (WireGuard will never be FIPS compatible, but Curve25519 is obviously not why).

Why is this by the way?

I've googled it and most of the responses I've found were "NIST doesn't talk about bcrypt and probably won't because it's related to blowfish and not SHA". And the other being "Blowfish is equivalent to SHA so if anything is approved blowfish would be approved, not BCrypt which is similar to PBKDF2, which is approved because it uses SHA".

Is it just bureaucratic inertia?

The point of FIPS is to deliberately narrow down the range of acceptable primitives, to simplify the evaluation of systems sold to the government.

(FIPS is very bad).

Can you elaborate on why this is a point of the FIPS? It sounds as if it's specific and by intention.

Yep. That which is globally optimal may be locally suboptimal.

I think your analogy misses the most important benefit: you must use the government's library. If people were allowed to choose other libraries, then they might choose wrong. And since the government protects companies from the consequences of making bad choices, the government can't let them make those choices.

The great failing of so many here is that they don't recognize that uniformity and centralization are more important than innovation. If those innovations really are better, then you can vote to elect representatives to nominate regulators to eventually change the requirements. This is how things work in a civilized society.

Great analogy.

It is a frustrating end result in this case. I wonder if there's any possibility for escalating this to a regulator's technical resources? I wonder if this kind of thing is typically left to the auditor discretion.

You make government cheaper and more efficient the same way you do with code, by removing as much as possible.

Cheaper is not always better.

Likewise, neither is smaller. Code golf is just for fun.