First, NUBeta.com Members Only is not affiliated with Northwestern University and NetID authentication is provided merely as a convienence.

In accordance with NUIT's policies, your NetID is NOT REQUIRED for use.
(see Rights and Responsibilities... for more information: Responsibilities Item 1)

If you do not wish to use your NetID to authenticate, please contact webmasternubeta.com BEFORE logging in and you may set up a different username/password combination.



How our NetID authentication works:
As a service to its students, Northwestern University provides a NetID and an associated email account. To use email, each user must authenticate with their respective mailserver (casbah, hecky, lulu, merle) before they are allowed to retrieve mail.

NUBeta.com Members Only makes use of NetID authentication in the exact same way that your mail client (Outlook, Eudora, etc) does. The site accepts your password and relays it to your mailserver (retrieved via PH). If your mailserver responds that the NetID/password combination is correct, NUBeta.com Members Only accepts that response and grants you access.

If the password match is successful, NUBeta.com Members Only stores an ENCRYPTED HASH of your password. Your plaintext password is erased from memory as soon as possible and is not stored anywhere on the NUBeta.com Members Only server.

About Encrypted Password Hashes:
Most systems, including Windows, store passwords in one-way encrypted hashes. When a password is first entered, it is encrypted and stored:

"mypassword" -> 34819d7beeabb9260a5c854bc85b3e44

The resulting hash cannot be decrypted to the original password. For subsequent authentication attempts, the inputted password is also encrypted and the two hashes are compared. If the hash of the inputted password matches the stored hash, the passwords must be the same. NUBeta.com Members Only only stores the hash to expedite the login process.

Because of the one-way property of the hash, the only way to decrypt an encrypted password hash is by using a brute-force attack, where every combination of letters, numbers, and symbols must be encrypted and compared to the hash.

Following Northwestern's password rules, there are a total of 374,238,318,861,264 password combinations. Even if 1,000,000 combinations could be tested per second, it would take 11.86 years to test every combination.

In addition to this, the password hashes are in a highly-protected database, guarded by multiple passwords and connection restrictions.

As you can see, NUBeta.com Members Only goes to great lengths to make sure your information is safe. It is only with utmost confidence in the security of our systems that we provide this service. If for any reason you have concerns about the system, please do not hesitate to contact us.

For an online encryptor, Click Here


For more information, contact webmasternubeta.com.