Banking-Grade Credential Stuffing: The Futility of Partial Password Validation

From blog.cloudflare.com

Recently when logging into one of my credit card providers, I was greeted by a familiar screen. After entering in my username, the service asked me to supply 3 random characters from my password to validate ownership of my account.

It is increasingly common knowledge in the InfoSec community that this practice is the antithesis of, what we now understand to be, secure password management.

For starters; sites prompting you for Partial Password Validation cannot store your passwords securely using algorithms like BCrypt or Argon2. If the service provider is ever breached, such plain-text passwords can be used to login to other sites where the account holder uses the same password (known as a Credential Stuffing attack).

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