Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

palant.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 94 posts

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

#51

Post by seandougall »

user5994461 wrote: post #38
azinman2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not correct. Unless you're specifically talking about some stuff by Apple. Do you know that windows has had password stores for many decades?

Which part was not correct? macOS does indeed have, and has long had, a keychain API, if that’s the part you’re thinking of.

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

#52

Post by stouset »

Santosh83 wrote: post #42

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…

For what it’s worth, assuming an alphabet of 72 characters (52 letters, 10 digits, 10 symbols), this is ridiculously higher entropy than a 128-bit encryption key.

There is no absolutely no need for your password to be this long. Even just twenty characters is within spitting distance of 2^128.

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

#53

Post by unsignedint »

pzxc wrote: post #47
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.

I agree with you on this one, KeePass is way to go compared to relying on browser's password manager.

Only wish these password management functionalities (not tool itself, but whole mess switching back and forth between target app/password manager) are more pleasing than the way it is now on mobile...

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

#54

Post by staticassertion »

joveian wrote: post #44
staticassertion wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 debugge…

> For someone without disk encryption (many people, maybe most?),

I would say they should really use FDE. An attacker with that level of control can do a lot - FDE is designed for this type of attacker.

But yes, that is one attacker that this would protect against.

> 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.

No need for debuggers, though that would certainly be one way to do it. This is not hard at all for an attacker, we see attackers hijacking processes all the time. Forcing the attacker to do 'a little more work' is not really the best place to spend time.

Firefox's threat is, in my opinion, malicious web pages, malicious extensions, or malicious use of/ abuse of their services etc (can't even imagine what abuse they see for their recent file sharing system). These probably take a significant amount of time and resources - these are the attackers they are probably dealing most days, if I had to guess. An attacker with unlimited offline access to an unencrypted hard drive seems pretty out of scope and better solved by the OS (I believe modern Windows and OSX systems actually FDE by default now). An attacker with full execution on the system also seems out of scope.

They could probably fix this master password thing pretty easily, it sounds simple enough and they might just because it's been called out, but my expectation is that this would probably not be a high priority otherwise.

I would also be concerned about users making the assumption that if they use a master password that they are safer from attackers - that it 'raises the bar', when it is unlikely to meaningfully for almost any attacker. A false sense of security is not a good thing.

I'm not a browser developer so I could be totally off and this could all be stuff they're super concerned about.

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

#55

Post by forapurpose »

takeda wrote: post #37

Not really what article talks about, but I don't understand why browsers while they copied some nice Opera[1] features (Chrome first then FF out of Chrome) none bothered to copy Wand. The way current browsers operate, makes it really inconvenient to use a master password, because each time you visit a page for which a password is stored, it will prompt you to enter a master password. This way you can't have a feature…

I thought FF copied Opera features before Chrome existed?

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

#56

Post by lclarkmichalek »

still_grokking wrote: post #46
azinman2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I mean, TPMs only started appearing in laptops in the mid 2000s, but whatever. Unlike the TPM on most non-Apple laptops I've bought recently, the OSX secure enclave does significantly impact the security of the system. I don't know why Apple decided to create their own instead of using the standard TPM, but they've done a pretty good job of using it, unlike most other hardware vendors.

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

#57

Post by eadmund »

staticassertion wrote: post #32
eadmund wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox Sync is insecure and should not be used. This didn't used to be the case — it used to be world-class — but the engineers decided to utterly destroy its security. 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). Worse, they use dynamically-downloaded JavaScript to hand…

> 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?

bscphil did a good job of it. They stretch the password into a key, but a 24-bits-of-entropy key still has only 24 bits of entropy, no matter how much you stretch it.

Their previous system actually used properly-secure encryption keys.

> I'm unsure why you think Mozilla would do this, or why you would be using Firefox at all if you expect them to push malware to your system.

There's a difference between trusting them to provide a bit-for-bit identical binary to everyone, and trusting them to never send malicious JavaScript to one person. Downloads are public & could at least in theory be verified by the community at large, while a single JavaScript download could be subverted once and the world would never notice.

As for the why — I explained why afterwards. Not just Mozilla has the ability to steal your passwords: any government which can force it to comply can also snarf your passwords. As for precedent, court orders require third parties to do things all the time.

The only way to build a secure system is to build a system one couldn't subvert even if one wanted to, or were forced to. Mozilla completely, totally and utterly failed at that.

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

#58

Post by joveian »

staticassertion wrote: post #54
joveian wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 debugge…

> For someone without disk encryption (many people, maybe most?), I would say they should really use FDE. An attacker with that level of control can do a lot - FDE is designed for this type of attacker. But yes, that is one attacker that this would protect against. > 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…

I did a quick search for "firefox master password" and the first result from mozilla.org mentioned that they recommend using a master password if you share your computer with someone else. So it sounds like you are right and they only consider it useful for preventing accidental wrong profile use.

Edit: Looking through some mozilla bugs starting with the one citrin_ru mentions reminded me that unless they fixed it recently (which I don't think is the case) the master password doesn't encrypt cookies, so it is even less useful for most people than it might seem (and it doesn't normally meet my expectation of helping with a stolen disk).

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

#59

Post by zitterbewegung »

pzxc wrote: post #47
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.

What if you took Firefox or chrome and replaced the password manager with a keepass compatible system by default and kept the usability?

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

#60

Post by Buge »

stouset wrote: post #52
Santosh83 wrote: post #42

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…

For what it’s worth, assuming an alphabet of 72 characters (52 letters, 10 digits, 10 symbols), this is ridiculously higher entropy than a 128-bit encryption key. There is no absolutely no need for your password to be this long. Even just twenty characters is within spitting distance of 2^128.

>For what it’s worth, assuming an alphabet of 72 characters (52 letters, 10 digits, 10 symbols), this is ridiculously higher entropy than a 128-bit encryption key.

No it's not. User-chosen data is rarely random, so it's safe to say that Santosh83's password is not random. This article claims English has 1.46 bits of entropy per character[1]. If Santosh83's password is regular English, then it would have ~105 bits of entropy.

>Even just twenty characters is within spitting distance of 2^128

Someone[2] sent bitcoins to a brainwallet secured only by the phrase "it was the best of times" (24 characters). The bitcoins were stolen in 4 seconds. 20 characters is not enough. You need to do actual entropy analysis. And don't use quotes from anywhere. Crackers crawl the internet and build databases of all the quotes they find online. This tends to include book quotes, movie quotes, etc.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1996-teahan.pdf

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ndsxi/a_test_of_b...

Post reply on HN