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Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

palant.de

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Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#41

Post by joveian »

yborg wrote: post #2

Fixing issues like this is clearly less important than implementing browser-side VR support, I don't see what Palant is on about. As a Firefox user, trading the security of any and all accounts I store passwords for in the browser is something I'd gladly exchange for ... anyway, VR is cool, right? Guess I should dump the password store and go all-in on the 1Password extension.

It is unfortunate that Mozilla does this without telling the user that you need a good password (or better, generating one for you), but you can just use a good password. 21 random base 64 characters is almost the strength of the 128-bit encryption. You can memorize it easily by writing it down (divide into three groups of seven) and entering it from the paper for two or three weeks. The trick is to try never to get it wrong (you will occasionally anyway, but try not to guess - the right answer eventually come to mind effortlessly before you look at the paper, which should be turned to not normally be visible). On linux, you can use `base64 < /dev/urandom` (or `tr -dc "[:graph:]" < /dev/urandom` which picks from a few more characters) to get the password.

Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#42

Post by Santosh83 »

Everyone suggesting to use a bigger and/or more random string are missing the point that your average user won't do that. As a sort of computer nerd, my master password is 46 characters from the full set of letters, numbers, symbols and in both cases. It took me a week to memorise it flawlessly. Do we really think a regular user will take this effort? Instead they will continue using their simple, short passwords (if they set a MP at all. Most won't), which is why the article is right that a resistant hashing algo like argon2 can only improve security. The issue is not protecting users whose systems have malware. That's obviously a battle lost before its even begun. The issue is someone gaining access to your password DB and then being able to brute-force within reasonable time, which the current key derivation allows and a stronger algorithm can plug that weakness. Presumably the changes are not complicated or labour intensive, so the fact it is an open bug since almost a decade is unfortunate.

Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#43

Post by staticassertion »

bscphil wrote: post #40
staticassertion wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of your remote data is protected by whatever password you use, rather than by a high-entropy key (which means if you choose a poor password you might as well leave your data in plaintext). Can you elaborate on this? What do you mean by 'protected' and 'high entropy key'? It makes it sound like they aren't key stretching, which seems unlikely. Can you provide a source here? > Worse, they use dynamically-download…

>Can you elaborate on this? What do you mean by 'protected' and 'high entropy key'? I can't be sure, but I believe GP is referring to how Firefox Sync originally encrypted all the data locally with a long key before uploading it to Mozilla servers. To sync your data onto a new device you would have to transfer the key, which was done by generating a 16 char temporary password at one end, and then typing it at the oth…

Got it - thanks, that's interesting. I'll probably check out how that worked.

Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#44

Post by joveian »

staticassertion wrote: post #9
delroth wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What attack vector would be mitigated by switching to a stronger hashing scheme for this specific use case? And are there other mitigations that exist for this attack vector that would be more appropriate? To me is seems that this feature of browsers is really only meant as a protection against non-advanced attackers accessing an unlocked computer. For this scenario, having a stronger hash would do nothing. Having a…

A lot of people have problems modeling threats. For example, in the article: > Anybody who ever designed a login function on a website will likely see the red flag here A login function on a website and a master password for your local system have very different threat models. Applying one to the other is a helpful heuristic but ultimately leads you in the wrong direction. If we ask 'who is the attacker in the situat…

For someone without disk encryption (many people, maybe most?), the encrypted database can be acquired if the machine is stolen while off. I would very much expect setting a master password to protect against that (at least unless other unencrypted personal information is used to take over accounts). With remote compromise of the system it is presumably possible to access the key if the browser is running via debuggers, it is at least a bit more work.

Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#46

Post by still_grokking »

azinman2 wrote: post #35
user5994461 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't help. All the passwords can be enumerated using the OS API. It would actually be a lot easier to gather passwords if all applications used the OS store.

But you still need to unlock the keychain to get those... so what’s the difference? If anything, the new iMac pro has a Secure Enclave, which means we can soon expect in some number of years that most computers will as well.

> If anything, the new iMac pro has a Secure Enclave, which means we can soon expect in some number of years that most computers will as well.

I don't know about Macs but PCs have a Smart-Card like Chip called TPM build in for about 20 years by now.

One of the main functions a TPM offers is the secure storage of encryption keys.

I wonder such a feature comes only now to Macs with about two decades of a delay?

Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#47

Post by pzxc »

vortico wrote: post #39

The author admitted the stronger-than-needed title in the first comment, but I'd like to make it clear when talking about practical personal security: There are ~100,000 people in the world that would think to run a GPU password cracker on your Firefox master password hash, if they had access and wanted to snoop. There are ~1,000,000,000 people that would think to open your browser and go to a website you use to try…

The alternative is not to give up on password management completely, but to use a proper password manager like KeePass.

Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#48

Post by kerkeslager »

yborg wrote: post #2

Fixing issues like this is clearly less important than implementing browser-side VR support, I don't see what Palant is on about. As a Firefox user, trading the security of any and all accounts I store passwords for in the browser is something I'd gladly exchange for ... anyway, VR is cool, right? Guess I should dump the password store and go all-in on the 1Password extension.

At least Firefox is open source and probably doesn't broadcast your passwords back to the server.

1Password is closed source and stores your passwords on a server which, should it ever be hacked, could easily cause all sorts of issues. If they received a secret order to compromise your accounts Lavabit-style, they wouldn't even have to be hacked--they might willingly backdoor their own product.

I use KeePass or KeePassX (depending on platform) which never require me to store my password database on someone else's computer.

Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#49

Post by kerkeslager »

joveian wrote: post #41
yborg wrote: post #2

Fixing issues like this is clearly less important than implementing browser-side VR support, I don't see what Palant is on about. As a Firefox user, trading the security of any and all accounts I store passwords for in the browser is something I'd gladly exchange for ... anyway, VR is cool, right? Guess I should dump the password store and go all-in on the 1Password extension.

It is unfortunate that Mozilla does this without telling the user that you need a good password (or better, generating one for you), but you can just use a good password. 21 random base 64 characters is almost the strength of the 128-bit encryption. You can memorize it easily by writing it down (divide into three groups of seven) and entering it from the paper for two or three weeks. The trick is to try never to get…

I prefer to use Diceware[1] as I find these passwords easier to memorize. But for a master password it doesn't matter as much since you only have to memorize it once.

If you're generating passwords from urandom, you can do this slightly nicer with:

    head /dev/urandom | LC_ALL=C tr -dc "[:graph:]" | head -c 21
A few things about this:

1. In case it's not obvious, 21 is the number of characters this will generate. Change that to generate more or fewer characters.

2. LC_ALL=C isn't necessary on some systems, but it's necessary on Mac OS and some others where `tr` expects UTF-8 encoded input on Mac OS unless that is overridden by the environment variable.

3. If you are generating a password for one of those dumb systems that restricts which characters you can use, you can change `"[:graph:]"` to something like `'A-Za-z0-9~!@#$%^&*_='` depending on which characters are allowed.

[1] http://world.std.com/%7Ereinhold/diceware.html

Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#50

Post by bradknowles »

kerkeslager wrote: post #48
yborg wrote: post #2

Fixing issues like this is clearly less important than implementing browser-side VR support, I don't see what Palant is on about. As a Firefox user, trading the security of any and all accounts I store passwords for in the browser is something I'd gladly exchange for ... anyway, VR is cool, right? Guess I should dump the password store and go all-in on the 1Password extension.

At least Firefox is open source and probably doesn't broadcast your passwords back to the server. 1Password is closed source and stores your passwords on a server which, should it ever be hacked, could easily cause all sorts of issues. If they received a secret order to compromise your accounts Lavabit-style, they wouldn't even have to be hacked--they might willingly backdoor their own product. I use KeePass or KeePa…

Sorry, you’ve got some things wrong about 1Password.

Yes, they provide a cloud option where you can store your passwords on their server for synchronization purposes. But you don’t have to use it. You could just not use synchronization at all, or use a file stored on Dropbox, or iCloud, or other cloud provider of your choice. And if you use only a local file, you can still choose to sync that over the local network with approved clients of your choice with their built in network sync server.

The 1Password authors have been pretty open about how distributed their team is, and how no one single government would be able to convince them to do those kinds of things — the other developers would find out and then the game would be over.

They are also open about the crypto algorithms they use.

As for KeePass or KeePassX, which version do you use? Which of the dozens and dozens of different implementations do you use? Which database format do they support? Do you build the binaries yourself with trusted compilers? Where do you get those trusted compilers and how can you be sure that they haven’t been compromised?

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