Okta – Username Above 52 Characters Security Advisory

&lt;&lt; The Bcrypt algorithm was used to generate the cache key where we hash a combined string of userId + username + password. During specific conditions, this could allow users to authenticate by only providing the username with the stored cache key of a previous successful authentication. &gt;&gt;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;man.openbsd.org&#x2F;crypt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;man.openbsd.org&#x2F;crypt</a><p>&lt;&lt; The maximum password length is 72. &gt;&gt;<p>So if the userid is 18 digits, the username is 52 characters, and the delimiters are 1 character each, then the total length of the non-secret prefix is 72, and bcrypt will drop the secret suffix.<p>You aren’t supposed to put more than the salt and the password into trad unix password hashes.

This is obviously a huge mistake by Okta (for the love of God understand how your crypto functions work before you apply them) but at the same time, a crypto function with a maximum input length that also auto-truncates the data sounds like bad API design. You are basically asking for someone to goof up and make a mistake. It&#x27;s much better to implement these things defensively so that the caller doesn&#x27;t inadvertently make a mistake. Especially with a hashing algorithm, because there is no way to verify that the result is correct.

Concise write up; not surprising that cache played a part.<p>Can&#x27;t tell if it&#x27;s issue with BCrypt or with the state-data going into the key, or combo-cache lookup tho.

I&#x27;m really sick of companies disclosing this shit late Friday afternoon.<p>Go fuck yourselves.<p>Sincerely, Everyone in the industry

They had literally 1 job: secure authentication. This isn&#x27;t the first time Okta has had a gaffe on a level that should cause any customer to reconsider. What&#x27;s that saying, &quot;Fool me once, shame on thee, fool me twice, shame on me&quot;. Don&#x27;t get fooled by Okta a second, third, or fourth time.

Why is anyone actually using Okta for anything these days?<p>IMO, better to choose point solutions and combine them.

Wasn’t there a project posted here that can spot this things automatically.<p>It’s was a fuzzer of some sort

This is written in C, right?