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Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

#39621 Secret Word insecure

Posted in ‘Akeeba Backup for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
4.3.4
PHP version
8.1.12
Akeeba Backup version
9.8.0 Pro

Latest post by nicholas on Monday, 16 October 2023 03:44 CDT

[email protected]

Hi there,

my front-end and remote backup features has been disabled automatically, because the Secret Word is insecure.

My Secret Word has been generated by Akeeba:

vQ93XG_1OUrOrwF5fnUCcNTD7M1XTFRE

The new suggested value is:

bMU5UBObdI6NmoG8iHuDgl5JDRwhZLgv

Looks similarly safe to me ;o)

Is that behavior normal? 

Thanks in advance!

Regards
Matthias

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

The security of the secret word is assessed automatically using Complexify. The probability of automatically generating a secret word which does not satisfy the minimum complexity requirement is really, REALLY low but not zero. So, yes, this is normal behaviour, just extremely rare. And I mean rare as in you are the first person in the last better part of a decade since we introduced this feature who ran into this.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

[email protected]

Hi Nicholas,

so it seems, I'm a very special person - the same happened today on an other installation ;o)

The generated insecure word was: Iwq-uVs-qu_hKVrH2mW14K9mHcaGcLzh

It's again a word with underscore - could that be the reason?

Regards
Matthias

[email protected]

Update:

  • I click on "Apply the suggested word"
  • I go to Control Panel
  • I get the message "Your Secret Word is insecure and can be easily guessed."
  • Repeat

When I enter a few more than the 32 chars, it works. No more Message...

Am I really the only one?

Regards
Matthias

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

You really are the only one this has ever happened to. I even tried creating a new site and installing Akeeba Backup 9.8.1 afresh. I can't reproduce your issue. If I let it use an auto-generated secret word there's never a complaint. This is also something I'm doing fairly regularly (several times every week) as I am setting up temporary sites to test features in development, or try to reproduce reported issues. Between that and the number of clients we have, I believe that if it was a bug we'd have definitely run into it over all these years.

The only case I can think that this might not be pure random chance is if PHP's regular expressions are subtly broken on your server, somehow not recognising underscore as valid punctuation. I have never seen that before, that's why I am hesitant to even entertain it as a likely explanation.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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