(skeletor is leading by example by adding that unnecessary apostrophe…)

  • teejay@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Sure, but the comic isn’t talking about legit password usage systems. It’s talking about how a comma could break the csv formatting of a csv file that came from a data breach and dump.

    • Tyfud@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      That’s still not how it would work.

      Ok, assuming that we’re talking about, like you say, a system that gets a breach which is storing PWs in clear text/plain text, instead of hashing it, which is a big if as those kinds of systems are either amateur/homebrew, or extinct at this point, but I digress. Let’s say it’s there.

      The attacker would run a sanitization script out of the SQL table that would shift those problem characters into proxy characters, or correct them if it’s going to cause a problem. One or two passwords lost to correct for thousands isn’t a big deal. The result of trying to put some sort of SQL Injection or CSV formatting bug into your password, hoping it was stored as plaintext, and the attacker wouldn’t be sanitizing the common formatting issues, is just silly.

      Plus, it’s not like they’re only exporting it once. They’ve usually copied the DB down locally, so they’ll see the formatting is skewed when parsing the CSV, and correct it on the next export out.

      I’m all for the humor here, I was just calling out that nothing about the ideas the OP suggested would work in real life SecOps scenarios.

      Souce: Am engineer at large corporation. Deal with scenarios and systems like this all the time.

      Edit: People are downvoting this, seemingly because they don’t like that the answer makes the OP’s joke less funny and pretty unlikely. This is why it’s difficult and frustrating to have these kinds of conversations on Lemmy or reddit. I am an expert. I responded with additional information to correct some misunderstandings. It gets down voted because…?