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LastPass: design flaw in communication to privileged components

bugs.chromium.org

11–20 of 45 posts

Re: LastPass: design flaw in communication to privileged components

#11

Password managers exchange a strong secret, something you know, for a weak one, something you have. Once an attacker gets to your database you're completely owned. When they compromise a normal password the damage is more contained if you maintain reasonable security practices.

What are "reasonable security practices" for maintaining strong, unique passwords over several hundred sites?

Re: LastPass: design flaw in communication to privileged components

#12
post #7

Password managers exchange a strong secret, something you know, for a weak one, something you have. Once an attacker gets to your database you're completely owned. When they compromise a normal password the damage is more contained if you maintain reasonable security practices.

Just about any scenario I can think of where the attacker could get to "what you have", by which I assume you mean the unencrypted password database (i.e. what you have after you entered something you know , since the whole point of a password manager is to have one strong password that you need to remember, instead of tens or hundreds probably-not-so-strong individual passwords), would also be a game-over scenario i…

time to start reading the posts, lady. the browser extension is exploited to reveal all passwords without requiring anyone to type in anything.

you're all idiots.

Re: LastPass: design flaw in communication to privileged components

#13
post #6

Password managers exchange a strong secret, something you know, for a weak one, something you have. Once an attacker gets to your database you're completely owned. When they compromise a normal password the damage is more contained if you maintain reasonable security practices.

I thought the point of a password manager is to allow you to have separate passwords for numerous services which are protected by centralizing those passwords somewhere (preferably somewhere you control, such as your own phone) and protecting the result with one password. Your model of them seems to involve them replacing a password locally, which I don't think anyone would recommend.

[deleted]

Re: LastPass: design flaw in communication to privileged components

#14
post #6

Password managers exchange a strong secret, something you know, for a weak one, something you have. Once an attacker gets to your database you're completely owned. When they compromise a normal password the damage is more contained if you maintain reasonable security practices.

I thought the point of a password manager is to allow you to have separate passwords for numerous services which are protected by centralizing those passwords somewhere (preferably somewhere you control, such as your own phone) and protecting the result with one password. Your model of them seems to involve them replacing a password locally, which I don't think anyone would recommend.

I would say password reuse can be pretty good! Simply have your own rule such as "letters 2 and 5 of the domain name" and combine those with your reusable password.

In fact, I'd go further and say that you can do this with your login name. So for example:

myemail+by@gmail.com for eBaY

This also helps mitigate those attacks where the attacker actually contacts support and socially engineers them into giving all your info and even stealing your account:

https://medium.com/@espringe/amazon-s-customer-service-backd...

If you are hosting with AWS you should really consider doing that http://www.techinsider.io/hacker-social-engineer-2016-2

Re: LastPass: design flaw in communication to privileged components

#15

Password managers exchange a strong secret, something you know, for a weak one, something you have. Once an attacker gets to your database you're completely owned. When they compromise a normal password the damage is more contained if you maintain reasonable security practices.

What are "reasonable security practices" for maintaining strong, unique passwords over several hundred sites?

For me I have a few standard passwords depending on type of security e.g forums which dont matter so much if people access vs email vs banking. On each I have change I make depending on the name of the business e.g. you could use the part of their business name to decide part of that password type thing. For someone like me who is less likely to be specifically targeted for hacking and more likely to lose account security to mass breaches like LinkedIn (twice now guys!), this seems a good way to limit chances of a broad account breaches while maintaining fairly easy to remember 100's of passwords. That said I completely acknowledge a sophisticated hacker would have no issues beating my method.

Re: LastPass: design flaw in communication to privileged components

#16
post #3
post #2

Agree with the comment that the blogger doesn't understand what phishing is. This could be done against a huge number of people through various approaches with ad network code or targeted attacks controlling path to internet. That's all setting aside how trivial it would be for nation states.

They have a history of trying to explain away their security problems as not really their fault. That alone should give any LastPass user pause.

That's unfair. LastPass has always been transparent about their problems, much more so than other companies like Dropbox.

And there's nothing in their response that tries shifting the blame: https://blog.lastpass.com/2016/07/lastpass-security-updates....

Re: LastPass: design flaw in communication to privileged components

#17
post #14
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the point of a password manager is to allow you to have separate passwords for numerous services which are protected by centralizing those passwords somewhere (preferably somewhere you control, such as your own phone) and protecting the result with one password. Your model of them seems to involve them replacing a password locally, which I don't think anyone would recommend.

I would say password reuse can be pretty good! Simply have your own rule such as "letters 2 and 5 of the domain name" and combine those with your reusable password. In fact, I'd go further and say that you can do this with your login name. So for example: myemail+by@gmail.com for eBaY This also helps mitigate those attacks where the attacker actually contacts support and socially engineers them into giving all your i…

This "clever" security measure would be annihilated in case of a well planned attack targeted against a single individual.

Re: LastPass: design flaw in communication to privileged components

#18
post #17
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say password reuse can be pretty good! Simply have your own rule such as "letters 2 and 5 of the domain name" and combine those with your reusable password. In fact, I'd go further and say that you can do this with your login name. So for example: myemail+by@gmail.com for eBaY This also helps mitigate those attacks where the attacker actually contacts support and socially engineers them into giving all your i…

This "clever" security measure would be annihilated in case of a well planned attack targeted against a single individual.

Do you realize that your AWS account can be compromised without something like this?

Re: LastPass: design flaw in communication to privileged components

#19

Password managers exchange a strong secret, something you know, for a weak one, something you have. Once an attacker gets to your database you're completely owned. When they compromise a normal password the damage is more contained if you maintain reasonable security practices.

What are "reasonable security practices" for maintaining strong, unique passwords over several hundred sites?

Randomly generate a password for every site. Store said passwords in a password manager protected with one master password which you remember (taking the number of passwords you would have to remember from hundreds (impossible) to one (very possible)). Even using the built-in password saving feature of your browser is fine for this if you can't be bothered to use anything else. Chrome even has an option to generate random passwords for you.

Re: LastPass: design flaw in communication to privileged components

#20

Password managers exchange a strong secret, something you know, for a weak one, something you have. Once an attacker gets to your database you're completely owned. When they compromise a normal password the damage is more contained if you maintain reasonable security practices.

But the point of failure is not likely to be your database of unencrypted passwords. Also if an attacker can get their hands on a password database which is stored locally you probably have more problems than just that.

Simply using the browsers built-in password saving capability with random passwords is still better than nothing (Chrome can even generate random passwords for you). Changing the password for one compromised site is better than having to change it for every site because of password reuse.

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