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Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids

arxiv.org

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Re: Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids

#3

Post by 1ba9115454 »

Perhaps this helps with trusting the password manager but it looks a bit complex to me.

Personally I'm more concerned about when I enter a master password that if there's a Trojan on my computer it's game over.

As most password managers are an encrypted database of sorts once it's encrypted all your passwords are out.

The only protection against that is some sort of 2FA.

Re: Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids

#5

Post by iancarroll »

I am pretty sure the code is reusing IVs for AES-CTR[0] (i.e. the encryption is worthless), because it doesn't specify an IV and Node seems to derive the IV from the key.[1] This seems like a massive footgun in Node.

I don't think their scheme results in different keys for each site, but I could be wrong.

[0] https://github.com/HainaLi/horcrux_password_manager/blob/mas...

[1] https://nodejs.org/api/crypto.html#crypto_crypto_createciphe...

Re: Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids

#6

Post by Santosh83 »

1ba9115454 wrote: post #3

Perhaps this helps with trusting the password manager but it looks a bit complex to me. Personally I'm more concerned about when I enter a master password that if there's a Trojan on my computer it's game over. As most password managers are an encrypted database of sorts once it's encrypted all your passwords are out. The only protection against that is some sort of 2FA.

I guess if your system is compromised then password security becomes gravely threatened, no matter how secure the password manager may be. The only partial solution I can think of is to have the OS sandbox every application from every other.

Re: Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids

#7

Post by simias »

1ba9115454 wrote: post #3

Perhaps this helps with trusting the password manager but it looks a bit complex to me. Personally I'm more concerned about when I enter a master password that if there's a Trojan on my computer it's game over. As most password managers are an encrypted database of sorts once it's encrypted all your passwords are out. The only protection against that is some sort of 2FA.

You can also use a hardware token to handle the encryption/decryption (yubikey/nitrokey/GnuPG smartcard/...).

If you have a trojan on your computer it'll still be able to decrypt your passwords while the token is plugged and unlocked of course, but at least offline attacks shouldn't be possible. Of course that doesn't mean you shouldn't use 2FA wherever possible to mitigate the risks further.

Some tokens can also be configured to wait for a physical button press to allow the decryption which which can help prevent a complete background decryption of your passwords (assuming that each password is stored with a different key, like with password-store for instance).

Re: Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids

#8

Post by letharion »

iancarroll wrote: post #5

I am pretty sure the code is reusing IVs for AES-CTR[0] (i.e. the encryption is worthless), because it doesn't specify an IV and Node seems to derive the IV from the key.[1] This seems like a massive footgun in Node. I don't think their scheme results in different keys for each site, but I could be wrong. [0] https://github.com/HainaLi/horcrux_password_manager/blob/mas... [1] https://nodejs.org/api/crypto.html#crypto…

I opened an issue on the topic. https://github.com/HainaLi/horcrux_password_manager/issues/1

Re: Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids

#9

Post by baby »

Nyubis wrote: post #4

The trick of entering a dummy username and password, which is then modified in the post request sounds a whole lot better than playing clipboard roulette or messing with the DOM.

This sounds pretty cool! What I'm wondering, is how they are intercepting the POST request and at what level?
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