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Why traditional password managers are flawed

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Re: Why traditional password managers are flawed

#51

Post by kybernetikos »

hobarrera wrote: post #28
kybernetikos wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a system that I wrote https://github.com/kybernetikos/sinkless (incidentally it uses a similar system to this article - PBKDF with SHA512 - in browser plugins) that supports many of these situations. * The character sets can be entered manually. They form public information and are stored locally, can easily be exported as csv. * Each password has a 'version' which you can increment. The version is considered p…

An alphabet isn't enough to describe some [stupid] bank password requirements (I do admit the banks are really the problem here though). Two banks I've worked with recently: * No consecutive digits, not your initials. Numbers cant be your day, month or year of birth. * No repeating any symbol in the entire password. Cannot contain a subset of a previous key (I don't know how long the subset is to trigger this, but I…

Wow, that's pretty crazy. With this setup, if you did fall foul of one of those rules, you'd have to increment the version until you no longer did.

Re: Why traditional password managers are flawed

#52

Post by kybernetikos »

acdha wrote: post #32
kybernetikos wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but on the other hand the master key is never stored anywhere, so your chance of getting hold of it is reduced. EDIT: as pointed out, no sensible system stores the master password. I do stand by the earlier 'single point of failure' point though. If you store a password vault somewhere and it goes down, or is encrypted by malware, or you lose the ability to access that storage for whatever reason you're…

It's reduced but by how much? For example, 1Password uses PBKDF2 with something like 10k or 100K rounds to encrypt the local vault. If you were looking at ways that could be compromised, is it really likely that you need to worry about an attacker getting a copy and dedicating a lot of expensive hardware to brute-forcing it anywhere near as much as the attacker getting malware on your system which captures those keys…

You're right, I was wrong. Theres no benefit from that point of view.

My system also uses PBKDF2 with 800K rounds :-)

Keystroke capture is the most scary, but I guess anything that doesn't do 2 factor is going to have trouble there.

Re: Why traditional password managers are flawed

#53

Post by BeetleB »

1ba9115454 wrote: post #11

I use KeePass and I'm quite happy. The database is local and enrypted with AES. My master password is around 72bits of entropy. I keep 2 files actually. Day to day stuff and critical services. So I only open up and therefore expose my master password infrequently for the critical services. (i.e. banking etc.) I've enabled 2FA on everything I can. So I think I'm safer than this deterministic solution as if my master p…

>I've enabled 2FA on everything I can.

This may make things less secure, especially if the second factor involves a phone.

https://www.wired.com/2016/06/hey-stop-using-texts-two-facto...

It's a lot easier than the article indicates to get control of your phone. People have just walked into the phone company's store and get whatever is needed to control your phone number. Security based on poorly trained frontline folks (i.e. the clerks at those stores) is the worst kind. I've fooled (or observed) leasing offices give the keys to an apartment to someone not on the lease. I've obtained hotel room keys that way. I've had checks cashed that were not signed.

Re: Why traditional password managers are flawed

#54

Post by acdha »

Xylakant wrote: post #41
tokenizerrr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except 1Password is also pwnd if an attacker gets mallware on your system? They just snatch the database and record keystrokes when you unlock it.

Any algorithmic pw-manager can be attacked the same way: just record the keystrokes when the master pass phrase is entered. If the attacker has malware on your system, assume all is lost.

That was exactly my point – on something other than iOS/ChromeOS there might be a chance if the attacker manages only a partial compromise[1] but in general it's wise to assume that a compromise will get the master passphrase or could simply read the unencrypted data out of the process memory and take precautions based on that worst-case scenario (e.g. using U2F everywhere it's available).

1. e.g. if the compromised process is sandboxed enough that the secure keyboard input features work or something like the macOS securityd running as a separate user prevents unrestricted access.

Re: Why traditional password managers are flawed

#55

Post by acdha »

mnarayan01 wrote: post #46
epistasis wrote: post #30

$ dpg "The sentence" word Doesn't this store all your secret info in your .bash_history file, an unencrypted plain text file, with a convenient marker for finding it in the history file? This is no better than just storing the password that DGP generates directly; it's deterministic and trivial to derive the password. For somebody concerned about a "master password" being insecure, this is a far far worse solution.

You could potentially add something like: HISTIGNORE='dpg *' to e.g. your .bashrc -- not sure if the version of bash on OSX supports HISTIGNORE though (plus many other issues).

This is true but I'd be really hesitant to recommend it since the failure mode is so subtle unless you updated dpg to do something like loudly throw an error if that's not set.

Re: Why traditional password managers are flawed

#56

Post by bluGill »

epistasis wrote: post #30

$ dpg "The sentence" word Doesn't this store all your secret info in your .bash_history file, an unencrypted plain text file, with a convenient marker for finding it in the history file? This is no better than just storing the password that DGP generates directly; it's deterministic and trivial to derive the password. For somebody concerned about a "master password" being insecure, this is a far far worse solution.

Worse it puts the secret into the process table where any user with ps can read it.

Re: Why traditional password managers are flawed

#57

Post by 1ba9115454 »

BeetleB wrote: post #53
1ba9115454 wrote: post #11

I use KeePass and I'm quite happy. The database is local and enrypted with AES. My master password is around 72bits of entropy. I keep 2 files actually. Day to day stuff and critical services. So I only open up and therefore expose my master password infrequently for the critical services. (i.e. banking etc.) I've enabled 2FA on everything I can. So I think I'm safer than this deterministic solution as if my master p…

>I've enabled 2FA on everything I can. This may make things less secure, especially if the second factor involves a phone. https://www.wired.com/2016/06/hey-stop-using-texts-two-facto... It's a lot easier than the article indicates to get control of your phone. People have just walked into the phone company's store and get whatever is needed to control your phone number. Security based on poorly trained frontline fol…

Most of my 2FA is via Google Authenticator or Authy.

Re: Why traditional password managers are flawed

#58

Post by 1ba9115454 »

kuzimoto wrote: post #48
1ba9115454 wrote: post #11

I use KeePass and I'm quite happy. The database is local and enrypted with AES. My master password is around 72bits of entropy. I keep 2 files actually. Day to day stuff and critical services. So I only open up and therefore expose my master password infrequently for the critical services. (i.e. banking etc.) I've enabled 2FA on everything I can. So I think I'm safer than this deterministic solution as if my master p…

I love using KeePass. I keep the database file at home and only use it remotely with a plugin to allow accessing it via SSH so that the file is never (permanently) stored on disk. I like to think that this is even more secure than other methods since even if someone were to log keystrokes, they would need to know the SSH server details as well to actually gain access to the file. It can also be used to store 2FA secr…

Authy can be used instread of Google authenticator and backups up an encrypted copy of your secrets.

Re: Why traditional password managers are flawed

#60

Post by maturz »

BeetleB wrote: post #53
1ba9115454 wrote: post #11

I use KeePass and I'm quite happy. The database is local and enrypted with AES. My master password is around 72bits of entropy. I keep 2 files actually. Day to day stuff and critical services. So I only open up and therefore expose my master password infrequently for the critical services. (i.e. banking etc.) I've enabled 2FA on everything I can. So I think I'm safer than this deterministic solution as if my master p…

>I've enabled 2FA on everything I can. This may make things less secure, especially if the second factor involves a phone. https://www.wired.com/2016/06/hey-stop-using-texts-two-facto... It's a lot easier than the article indicates to get control of your phone. People have just walked into the phone company's store and get whatever is needed to control your phone number. Security based on poorly trained frontline fol…

At worst enabling 2FA would make no difference but it will not make it less secure if you still need the password (might not always be the case but then it's not true 2FA).

I would argue that even if it can be beaten it will add security since that extra hurdle can stop a lot of low effort attacks.

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