The future of challenging and authentication?

Guys, do you play at too many challenge sites like me?

If so, possibly you have encountered the same problem. Although I know the risk of using the same password for many accounts, as a human, I still can't overcome it. And as a result I had to change dozens of passwords last month when someone hacked HellBound Hackers and stole the password database, although I was pretty sure that it would take years for him to crack my password.

There are many password-manager software out there that try to give a solution to this problem, but they are insecure and inconvenient. You will still have to bring some data file from them with you to be able to log in from another computer. Even the implementation by Bruce Schneier the security guru still can't solve this problem completely.

Another solution to this problem is using online password managers. But as Internet security is bad these days, and privacy is just an enchanted word, I don't trust those so much.

Yesterday I stumbled upon OpenID, yet another solution for easy authentication. The idea is that you can use the same OpenID to authenticate on multiple websites. Being gradually supported by some big organizations, I guess OpenID will become popular for social networks soon. But surely it still lacks some trivial features for challenging.

So, which additional features do we need for OpenChallengerID? An universal user profile and ranking system. They are being developed under a new project that I, Gizmore and Inferno are working on. The project was original named WeChall, then changed to Challengers, but it's still not the official codename yet. And the project is still at the early stage of development. If you have any idea/suggestion feel free to contact us.

Electrica

Just solved 2 challs at Electrica and advanced to Veteran Trooper, so I thought I should write something about it.

Electrica the Puzzle Challenge is a cool challenge site by Caesum, one of the best challengers out there. It is located at http://www.caesum.com.

At Electrica you can solve puzzles on cryptography, steganography, maths, programming, executables, misc, and sokoban too :) The puzzles are organized quite well. You start with easy puzzles, and when you solve enough of them you get access to the harder ones. There is enough information to get you started, and at the site you can even find a cool challengers handbook written by Caesum, which covers basic knowledge and techniques for challenge solving.

Give it a try, guys!

HackQuest

Hey guys,

The challenge site of today is HackQuest at http://www.hackquest.de. It is pretty much similar to TBS, with challenges divided into various categories: applet, crackit, crypto, exploit, flash, javascript, linux, logic, programming, special and stegano. Atm there are almost 100 challenges.

The major challenges at HackQuest are quite easy, but still there are some tough ones. The hardest one so far is "The invation II", which is solved only by Anto, although there's a £20 prize for the first solver.

There's surely more to tell about HackQuest, but probably my friend flamecruiser will want to provide more information :P