A suggestion from the MaNGOS founder

[metagame]

It's trivial to set up a service to transfer account data to another server. Every account is associated with a unique email address.

If Nostalrius emails a unique key to every account, and encrypts each account's data with that key and also another key created and kept private by Nostalrius, they can give the data to anyone without fear of it being brute-forced. It would be infeasible to brute-force that data within the lifetime of the universe.

Upon account retrieval, on the new server's website the original owner of the account would enter their key. At that point the new server would retrieve the private key from Nostalrius, and thus using both keys decrypt that player's information. This could easily be an automated process.

[Thefilth]

It's trivial to set up a service to transfer account data to another server. Every account is associated with a unique email address.

If Nostalrius emails a unique key to every account, and encrypts each account's data with that key and also another key created and kept private by Nostalrius, they can give the data to anyone without fear of it being brute-forced. It would be infeasible to brute-force that data within the lifetime of the universe.

Upon account retrieval, on the new server's website the original owner of the account would enter their key. At that point the new server would retrieve the private key from Nostalrius, and thus using both keys decrypt that player's information. This could easily be an automated process.

Sounds good to me.

[Mimma]

Every account is associated with a unique email address.

No, the email address is not unique. You could use same email address multiple times, so email address is just a part of the key.

[metagame]

Every account is associated with a unique email address.

No, the email address is not unique. You could use same email address multiple times, so email address is just a part of the key.

Strange, I seem to remember not being able to sign up for a new account using the same email. Either way, they will just have to send multiple emails to the same email address, one for each account.

[octet]

Sounds like they're never going to release the account or char's. I'm still hopeing for a public release to revive the quality of vanilla servers. The database with a cleared account and char data would still be great. This will give us something great to build off of.. The current public "classic database" needs lots of work. Not to mention all the reworked scripts and server files.

[r00ty]

If Nostalrius emails a unique key to every account, and encrypts each account's data with that key and also another key created and kept private by Nostalrius, they can give the data to anyone without fear of it being brute-forced. It would be infeasible to brute-force that data within the lifetime of the universe.

It's fairly pointless speculating about how it will actually be done. But they don't need to email anything.

A stored procedure/script or external tool just needs to be created which will extract all the data associated with a player. That is account, characters, items, reputation, guild affiliation (probably each guild member could have the guild setup included too) etc etc. Such that you have a single file in .sql or .xml, whatever which can be used to restore everything about the player and their characters.

Then a key can either be generated from, or encrypted with a hash derived from a combination of the account name, email address and password hash. The file would then be encrypted with that key and assigned a filename based on the hash value of the user's account name.

So, to recover you would need to provide account name, email and password in order to first find the file, and then to recover the data inside. At which point another script would be able to import the data into a fresh database (possibly performing some renumbering along the way).

In short, there are ways to release the data such that it's public, but your personal data can only be recovered with your consent.

[SikSan]

Well, even if they will not be able to transfer our accs - it's not rly a disaster. I'd better worrying about proper successors to pick up the banner from the ground. If there will be a good dev team endorsed by nost ones with the nost core, I'd gladly get a fresh start again. It's even better imo. Server start is always something special.

[metagame]

The purpose of my post was to illustrate that there are ways to release the data that both satisfy PII laws as well as provide a way for users to recover their accounts. Also the entire point was to remove the possibility of brute forcing the data.

So, to recover you would need to provide account name, email and password in order to first find the file, and then to recover the data inside. At which point another script would be able to import the data into a fresh database (possibly performing some renumbering along the way).

Any intermediate security researcher / hacker / whatever could take the db of 800,000 account name, email, and password combos and brute force at least 5%, if not 10% of them within a week. Without a strong key the information should not be released.

Well, even if they will not be able to transfer our accs - it's not rly a disaster. I'd better worrying about proper successors to pick up the banner from the ground. If there will be a good dev team endorsed by nost ones with the nost core, I'd gladly get a fresh start again. It's even better imo. Server start is always something special.

100% agreed.

[r00ty]

Any intermediate security researcher / hacker / whatever could take the db of 800,000 account name, email, and password combos and brute force at least 5%, if not 10% of them within a week. Without a strong key the information should not be released.

Brute-force the combination of account name, email address AND password? Maybe for the account john, email [email protected] password "johnsmith" I might agree. But then they deserve it.

At any rate, the point I was trying to make is that it's actually quite possible to encrypt the data to a reasonable security standard without emailing. How they go about it, I don't mind. But I wanted to put to rest the impression some people gave that it's just not possible to deliver anonymous data encrypted in such a way that only the account owner can decrypt. It certainly is possible and what's being discussed here are only some of the ways it could be achieved.

[Winterflaw]

theluda, don't you think this discussion is something you should be having with the the nostalrius dev team directly, instead of involving the nost community?

How does one contact the Nost dev team directly?