#Detect compromised passwords how to
#Detect compromised passwords password

#Detect compromised passwords how to

How to Easily Check Your Users’ Passwords The Have I Been Pwned API allows you to make as many requests as you want, which makes it particularly useful for checking to see if your users’ passwords have been breached.

Downloading the breached data hashes directly: (scroll down on the page to find the download links), or.

Have I Been Pwned allows you to access breached data by either: To help developers adopt this new NIST recommendation, Troy Hunt created the free service Have I Been Pwned which aggregates all data breaches into a massive database. This is not only impractical, but a risk on many levels (security, legal, compliance).

#Detect compromised passwords password

In order to check a user’s password against a list of breached passwords you need to have a massive database of every set of leaked credentials. The only problem with the NIST recommendation is that it is hard to implement.

To combat this, the officially recommended NIST solution is that you check each user-provided password to ensure it isn’t one of these leaked credentials - thereby reducing the odds that an attacker will be able to easily guess user credentials on your site. Once those passwords were leaked, attackers would download the compromised passwords and use them to try to log into other user’s accounts.Īn attacker might, for example, try to log into user accounts using your leaked password because they know that this was a real password that someone was using, and the likelihood of other people using it is (you included) is high. This is a big deal in the security community because for many years now, as more and more websites have been breached, attackers have started downloading the breached user credentials and using them to attempt to compromise accounts elsewhere.įor instance, let’s say that your password, “fdsah35245!~!3”, was breached in the well-known Sony data breach back in 2014. Mean that every time a user gives you a password, it’s your responsibility as a developer to check their password against a list of breached passwords and prevent the user from using a previously breached password. Today I’m going to show you how you can easily add this functionality to any website you run using PassProtect, an open-source developer library we created specifically for this purpose. Not too long ago, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) officially recommended that user-provided passwords be checked against existing data breaches.