this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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I believe the passwords are stored as hashes, not sent directly to the server, at least I certainly hope so.
They're sent directly to the server and stored as hashes. There's nothing stopping someone from logging the plaintext password, or removing the hash mechanism, though. Make sure to follow best practices and use a unique password on every website.
Oh jeeze, I guess the hashing system can't work locally because then we'd know how the hashing works and could crack it, darn.
Hashing could happen client-side, but there's not much of a difference. If you're using HTTPS, then all traffic to the server is end-to-end encrypted anyway.
At some point you have to trust the website that you're connecting to, but obviously don't re-use passwords, use a password manager, etc etc
If passwords are hashed on the client side and sent to the server to authenticate, then all an attacker would need is the password hash and not the original password to authenticate. So it could protect your original password but not your account.
A few years ago the plain text passwords would show up in the logs. That has been changed since then, but a malicious instance admin can easily revert this change and keep a log of plaintext passwords.
The developers explained to me that adding client-side hashing would be problematic because different clients might do the hashing in different ways, and that the desired solution is to add OAuth at some point. There is also a bit more discussion about this in that thread: https://lemmy.ml/comment/97830
I lack the technical knowledge in client-side hashing to explain why this is the case, but as far as I can tell client-side hashing is not common at all. The standard is to hash the passwords server-side.
I do think that it is important to be aware of what a malicious instance admin can potentially do: they can log your plain-text password, see your e-mail and correlate it to your IP, look at what posts you like/dislike, and read your non-encrypted private messages. But these are not "Lemmy" problem, as these are general issue when it comes to trusting the servers of the sites that you create an account in.
An important benefit of Lemmy is that you can actually set up your own server or use the server of someone who you really trust, and you can use it to interact with the rest of the instances. It is also possible to create an account without providing an e-mail, a phone number is not required, and you can usually access instances via a VPN or Tor. These are not a common luxuries when it comes to other sites.
Using unsafe passwords is dangerous in a lemmy instance, but it is dangerous anywhere.
Hashing on the client side creates a “pass the hash” vulnerability. What you’ve done in that case is made the hash itself the password, because that’s all the client needs to pass to the server to authenticate. This means that if those hashes are leaked, they can be immediately used to access the server instead of being cracked first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pass_the_hash