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Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids

arxiv.org

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Re: Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids

#101

Post by lysium »

pitaa wrote: post #48
danjoc wrote: post #45

Sticking with zx2c4 pass. It is an assembly of gnupg, git, and pwgen. Trusted open source components. Works with a Yubikey (opensc and gpg-agent) to prevent private key theft via software. PassFF extension provides excellent browser integration. Android Password Store and OpenKeychain allow pass and yubikey to work on my mobile. Strong 2 factor password storage everywhere I need it. My biggest problem these days is d…

What is it with banks and their annoyingly terrible "security" requirements? My old bank once sent me an email saying I had to reset my password. The email seemed legit, but upon following the link therein something didn't seem quite right. So I use another device to visit my bank's site directly. Upon trying to login, I get redirected to the same form I reached from the email link and had a sinking realization that…

I think it's OK to have short passwords if you block access after a few wrong login attempts. The password reset Form you've described is ridiculous, though.

Re: Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids

#104

Post by tIONTamINariciA »

deno wrote: post #102
tIONTamINariciA wrote: post #86

It's fun that the authors readily admit that the idea is for paranoid people. https://xkcd.com/538/

Being vulnerable to blunt objects does not mean you shouldn’t care about other attack vectors.

Overly focusing on one attack vector still leaves you vulnerable to many others. System designers need to consider risk:reward and effort:reward for users.

The paper offers an interesting but extreme extension into one aspect of security that users control. That is great to offer an extreme solution for the paranoid. If implemented well, even the less paranoid could use it.

Sadly this solution still offers less security than systems integrated into SSO/OAuth and 2FA.

Re: Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids

#105

Post by dave1629 »

stinos wrote: post #103

a password manager that is designed holistically Honest question: what does 'holistically' mean in this context?

(co-author here)

Good question - it means the whole system (that is, both the client and server) were designed with the goal of limiting the exposure of the user's passwords in all ways we can - including time (not exposing them in the DOM and having the minimum possible exposure to the browser with acceptable user experience), code (minimizing the amount of code that has access to the user's credentials), and organizations (minimizing the trust the user has to put in any one provider).

Re: Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids

#106

Post by pishpash »

kybernetikos wrote: post #60
MatthewWilkes wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only true for very specific threat models. For most people, the limit in entropy for your passwords implied by keeping them all in your head makes them more vulnerable than writing them down in a place with imperfect security.

I recently wrote a thing for myself to let me remember one password and generate different passwords for each of my accounts. https://github.com/kybernetikos/sinkless I like it because there isn't any third party or service for me to trust, but I can still have unique complex passwords for each purpose. It feels pretty much the same as having them all in my head.

How do you deal with devices that do not support extensions?

Re: Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids

#107

Post by analogist »

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…

Wow. This is yet another example of the fatal combination of Rolling Your Own Crypto + Using OpenSSL Directly And Blowing Your Own Foot Off Because It Lets You.

  var cipher = crypto.createCipher('aes-256-ctr', key.toString('hex'))
Besides the completely fatal error of using derived and non-unique IVs (fatal as in, if you encrypt more than 1 item with it, it is exactly as good as plaintext because any two items encrypted with the same key+iv in CTR mode cancels out to plaintext), isn't using hex encoding vastly constraining the possible complexity-per-byte of the key?

A single hard-coded salt for key derivation:

  const key = crypto.pbkdf2Sync(auth, '0945jv209j252x5', 100000, 512, 'sha512');
Again, the salt is only lowercase alphanumeric. This makes this 120-bit salt really just a 77-bit salt. But since it's hard-coded and not randomly generated, it's a 0-bit salt.

Can everyone who is developing crypto apps Just Use NaCl/Libsodium?

Re: Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids

#108

Post by pishpash »

haberman wrote: post #72

Why on earth isn't the industry moving away from per-site passwords? They are terrible. The fact that you need your own app to "manage" them is just evidence of how terrible they are. People should be able to use their phones, Yubikey, TouchID, etc. as their authentication, without needing a password (except a master password for the phone/Yubikey/TouchID). And yet I see no movement towards this from the industry. Ar…

A hundred times yes. Passwords should only ever have been allowed locally. When untrusted web sites started to demand passwords for authentication they went down the wrong path already. The industry (including OS and hardware makers) really dropped the ball on this one in the early days with scant support for physical token authentication that people could have gotten used to. Even Yubikey piggybacks on a USB port, when all the energy spent on idiotic fingerprint readers could have been better spent on creating a standardized, dedicated hardware key port.

Re: Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids

#109

Post by rkeene2 »

theossuary wrote: post #66
danjoc wrote: post #45

Sticking with zx2c4 pass. It is an assembly of gnupg, git, and pwgen. Trusted open source components. Works with a Yubikey (opensc and gpg-agent) to prevent private key theft via software. PassFF extension provides excellent browser integration. Android Password Store and OpenKeychain allow pass and yubikey to work on my mobile. Strong 2 factor password storage everywhere I need it. My biggest problem these days is d…

I used pass for a while before I moved on to gopass. It's a drop-in replacement for pass with a bunch of useful features (like encrypting a password-store for multiple people, or "mounting" password stores). Hope it gets picked up and supported more, it's pretty nice. https://github.com/justwatchcom/gopass

You might also want to consider hunter2, it's similar but with smartcards.

https://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/repository/hunter2/

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