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1Password X: A look at the future of 1Password in the browser

blog.agilebits.com

151–160 of 181 posts

Re: 1Password X: A look at the future of 1Password in the browser

#151
post #107
post #46

I purchased the standalone Mac 1Password app, but moved back to LastPass. I hate LastPass, and want to use 1P but LP just seems to work better. Despite being bloated and ugly. Admittedly, I haven't tried 1P for around a year now. So as I have a license, I have been tempted to go back. Is it worth it? My biggest gripe is in Chrome on iOS. Nothing ever seems to be able to autofill correctly and the UX is just horrible.…

Disclosure: I work for AgileBits, makers of 1Password Chrome on iOS is a unique situation. We offer two things for developers that integrate with 1Password: 1. Native application integration. The idea here is that apps that offer a login to their service/site can pull the username and password from 1Password, then insert it into their native UI controls and sign the user in 2. Web view integration. The idea here is t…

Thanks for the response. I thought the Chrome issue may have be something like you mentioned.

The fact that you're here and replying is another reason why I want to like 1Password. I'd be shocked if a LastPass employee responded to me.

Will try copying my passwords over tomorrow and see how I get on!

Re: 1Password X: A look at the future of 1Password in the browser

#152
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not a beggar, though. You paid for the product! Honestly as long as they don’t break the current version, I’m fine with what I bought. I have 1Password now on MacOS, iOS, Android, Windows — and I guess I can get it on my Linux box now if I want to pay a subscription.

Yes you are. You paid for a product that continues to work exactly the way it did when you paid for it. They're not obligated to give me new features to the product I paid for at no cost to me, especially when it's a from-scratch rewrite. That makes all of us beggars since what we paid for still exists and they're not taking it away.

[deleted]

Re: 1Password X: A look at the future of 1Password in the browser

#153
post #130

not sure if I am happy or sad to see Agilebits go this route

It's not a change in direction. It's a broadening of the path. Apps and extensions are still getting updates, and there is no plan to slow down. 1Password X is for people who can't or won't install the apps (Linux, Chrome OS, corporate restrictions, etc.)

Re: 1Password X: A look at the future of 1Password in the browser

#154

Nope. I'm out then having bought desktop licenses from 1.x to 4.x for Windows and OS X.

Nothing is changing for you. Apps and extensions are still getting updates, and there is no plan to slow down. 1Password X is only for people who can't or won't install the apps (Linux, Chrome OS, corporate restrictions, etc.).

Re: 1Password X: A look at the future of 1Password in the browser

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm simply pointing out the elephant in the room. If there is no ability to audit the source code of the password manager, and the source code is managed by a third party company, then for all intents and purposes, the third party company has theoretical access to everything (regardless of what encryption is used). It boils down to trust, and that trust can be violated by a single rogue employee at AgileBits. It coul…

First, I'd like to point out that this concern is completely orthogonal to a hosted service, and has no connection to it. Second, with the inability to check that a given binary came from a given source tree, open source does not help us audit what gets executed. If we're supposing that Agilebits' build process has been compromised, then we're in the same realm as considering a compromised build process for .deb or .…

[Disclosure: I work for AgileBits, the makers of 1Password]

Thanks. I (as you'd expect) agree with both points.

The second one is particularly challenging. Deterministic builds are possible for some categories of software, but it will be a long time in coming. And for software that is updated frequently, it is even harder for people to practically check that what they are running is the reviewed code. But the technology is improving for this to be more practical. On the other hand, app stores move things further away from having the ability to distribute determinist builds.

This is not an excuse to not seek openness, but it does point out that there are lots of things to do that most people don't to get the benefits of that kind of inspection.

Re: 1Password X: A look at the future of 1Password in the browser

#156
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's your concern then I'm afraid there's little we can do to change your opinion and perhaps 1Password isn't the solution for you. I don't mean to sound rude or anything like that. Just being honest. We have had grand visions of offering portions of our source (notably the cryptographic portions) available for review, note, not open source in the sense you can use it but in a license that makes it available for…

I'm simply pointing out the elephant in the room. If there is no ability to audit the source code of the password manager, and the source code is managed by a third party company, then for all intents and purposes, the third party company has theoretical access to everything (regardless of what encryption is used). It boils down to trust, and that trust can be violated by a single rogue employee at AgileBits. It coul…

[Disclosure: I work for AgileBits, the makers of 1Password]

I'd like to elaborate on the two points made by @epistasis

1. Ability to deliver of a malicious client does not depend on where your encrypted data lives. If you sync over your own private network or if your encrypted data is held by us, it is just as difficult (or hard) to get away with delivering a malicious client.

2. There is a lot of security value to openness and having the source available, but it is only a defense against deliberately malicious software if you compile the software yourself. Otherwise, there is a very weak trust chain between the code that has been reviewed and the binary you are running.

For the first point, a malicious client wouldn't need to exfiltrate all of your encrypted data. It would only need to exfiltrate the credentials needed to obtain your encrypted data. (As well as exfiltrating keys, etc). So for the overwhelming portion of people there is no significant difference with respect to us having your encrypted data or it living some place else.

As for the second point, tools for deterministic builds are improving, but there are still practical impediments. In theory there are ways to ensure a good trust chain between the reviewed source and the binaries that people run. But these are far from ready for our target users: everybody.

So if you, say, recommend KeePass for this sort of reason, are you also recommending it to people who will check the signatures on the source and then build from that? (I have enormous respect for both KeePass and for those who use it that way. But I have less respect for those who would recommend that to everyone. I hope that we are past the bad old days of "some people don't deserve security.")

While we can't completely rule out the possibility of delivering a malicious client (through us turning evil, external compulsion, or an insider attack), there are things that we can do to make it harder for that to go undetected.

You will find that where we can we have made it easy to run 1Password attached to a debugger. People with sufficient skills can see that it behaves as we say it does. This makes it far more likely that a widely distributed malicious client wouldn't go undetected.

Also to support this (and try to gain some of the security benefits of openness), we've gone into gory detail about how 1Password works. Sure there are holes in some of the documentation, but we are slowly filling in those.

I'll also mention the third claim that a "single employee" could cause the distribution of a malicious client. Again, there is no way to completely rule that out, but it would be hard for any single or small group of people do that without running a significant risk of this being detected internally. So it would have to be a fairly large conspiracy. And as we know, the plausibility of any conspiracy diminishes rapidly with the number of people who have to keep the secret. There are many eyes on the source, many eyes on the build and distribution process, and very few hands on the code signing keys.

Several times I've mentioned "significant chance of getting caught". Consider the risks to anyone trying to do evil this way. What are the consequences to them if they are caught, and so how big of a risk will they accept? So even though we can't make it impossible for someone to get away with it, we do what we can to make it hard to get away undetected.

None of this is perfect. And you have to weigh your own choices. But when you do so, make a fair comparison with the realistic alternatives instead of against an ideal.

Re: 1Password X: A look at the future of 1Password in the browser

#157
post #115

There is a segment of your users that still want the original 'on-prem' version that you started out with. These nerds have money and understand you want a sustainable business model. Just charge these people an annual software maintenance fee and stop neglecting the standalone version. Yes it wont satisfy everyone, but it will stop all the negative PR that comes out whenever you do something that is artificially clo…

Disclosure: I work for AgileBits, makers of 1Password How are we neglecting our standalone users? I'm really curious here because we are still introducing features in our existing applications that work for our standalone users. Certain new applications like 1Password X and our CLI are only really easily possible because of 1Password.com, but just because these are being offered doesn't mean we're neglecting our stan…

Just charge an upgrade fee for the next stand-alone version and then you can get your revenue back.

But not charging for stand-alone upgrades you make it seem like the only choice for a revenue stream is cloud-hosting.

Will you charge an upgrade fee or not? (for stand-alone)

Re: 1Password X: A look at the future of 1Password in the browser

#159
Agile Keychain - 41.9 MB

Created Wednesday, September 2, 2009 at 5:15 PM

Modified Tuesday, November 14, 2017 at 10:02 PM

I really don't like the idea of ever putting all my passwords on a server that requires Agilebits to run it. You guys are a dev shop. Let users keep their passwords themselves and keep the stand-alone version (and extensions for it!) going with simple version upgrade fees.

Re: 1Password X: A look at the future of 1Password in the browser

#160
post #124

I’ve been using 1Password for years, mainly because the data stays local. If they decide to go full cloud-mode I’m switching to something else or just write my own cli password manager.

Disclosure: I work for AgileBits, makers of 1Password We've already announced that 1Password 7 for Mac will be available via standalone licenses, and 1Password 7 for Windows will offer standalone vaults and be available via a standalone license model. So nothing is changing in that regard. Our 1Password.com is the default solution we send our users to but standalone vaults are an option for those that wish to continu…

Thank you for your reply! I'm more than glad to pay for standalone licenses as I find 1Password extremely useful.
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