this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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How would they know how many digits changed? They don't store the password in cleartext.
Right?
...
No you don't need to store anything in clear text to check password parameters
Well they don't need to store it to a drive. You just entered your old password in order to login and authorise your password change.
It'll still be in memory against your session.
You could take the old password, change one or two letters and compare the hash to the hash of the new password?
That's the point though.
You're not supposed to have the old password. If you had the old password you could just compare it to the new password.
The only way you can do it is to take the new password and make a hash for every possible single-character variation and compare them all to the old hash
Sorry, that's what I meant as well :) Came out upside down when I wrote. We used to figure out shitty ISP router passwords this way by having a table of common passwords and their hashes.
Used to have monthly changes for a Microsoft account. When trying to change, it said "You used this password 6 months ago, please use another", besides the "passwords needs to be at least this different" message. Clearly they are storing them, not sure if they're stored cleartext or they're decrypting them on the fly somehow
You should not be able to decrypt a password, passwords aren't encrypted but hashed, they would be insecure would they be encrypted.
Hashing differs from encryption in that it is irreversible, because two or more strings might result in the same hash if the hashing function is applied to them (hashing is not injective).
But since your password will always yield the same hash you can compare the two hashes and if they are equal you are considered authenticated. If you try to log in with a different password (or even the hash of the correct password) then it will produce a different hash resulting in a failed authentication attempt
The way crackers get a password if they have the hash is by guessing pw candidates and using the hash function on them, if its the same as the hash they have they found the/a valid password. The guessing can be quite involved and with enough time and data about a victim often 12-13 digit passwords with special characters and all can be cracked - If the victim used a somewhat mnemonic pw that is. Generated pws from a password safe are much safer (but usually also longer).
In your case I suspect MS was storing a history of hashes which is not advisable as it gives potential crackers more to work with, but its way less bad then storing plain text or encrypting passwords