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I Lost All Faith in LastPass

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Re: I Lost All Faith in LastPass

#231

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

kcartlidge wrote: post #197
samtho wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ran into this before, actually. As of about a year ago, Lastpass partially used cached data to generate some portion of exported data, but that cache is not diligently kept up to date.

> but that cache is not diligently kept up to date Is the ability to take a payment the only thing LastPass got right?

No, not true. I'm using 1Password and while I like it, there are a few things LastPass got right where it even beats 1Password.

The one on top of my mind is that you can unlock LastPass with a PIN. My wife has a phone with a glass cover (to protect it from the children), which "broke" fingerprint unlock.

She's required to type the full password every time to unlock it, which is particularly hard on phone (long password).

On top of that, lastpass app (phone) had the option to "force" autofill from a notification. For some apps where the popup never really shows up with 1Password, I was able to force it using LastPass and then fill. With 1Password the only option is to go to the app and copy-paste.

Those are not game-breaking though, given the many, many bugs that LastPass (app on phone) had, the most annoying was: open the autofill and when searching, just no result shows up. This made the autofill useless a good chunk of the time.

On top of that, LastPass EXTENSION (chrome) has the option of choosing between sharing states between browser profiles or not sharing states between browser profiles. This is very useful in my case, because my wife has a chrome profile under my OS user, but we can still have 2 different lastpass "logins". From this perspective, 1Password is actually entirely broken: if you login into the native application (which is basically required for decent functionality), you are not allowed to login into 2 different 1password profiles through the chrome extension unless they are on different URLs (e.g. mycompany.1password.com vs 1password.ca).

Finally, LastPass was consistent: web, extension and app had the same capabilities.

1Password is highly inconsistent, where the native app has more capabilities than all of them, the extension has no edit capabilities but has better read capabilities than the web version and the web version has a mix of edit and read capabilities. For example, the native app can "batch add tag", but the web cannot do that.

Re: I Lost All Faith in LastPass

#232

Post by smallerfish »

rtev wrote: post #202
nebulous1 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also how, say, firefox's password manager compares. I've tried to look up technical comparisons before but found them unconvincing (making clearly outdated or incorrect claims). You can get the standalone managers compared to each other, but the non-standalones are missing.

I do know the answer to this - Firefox is not an acceptable alternative to a strong password manager. Local admin can dump any passwords from Firefox, and I think a user can even dump their own passwords from Firefox on windows and Linux.

I don't think that matters. Local admin can also install a rootkit or a keylogger. Physical/admin access is game over no matter what you use.

Re: I Lost All Faith in LastPass

#233

Post by im3w1l »

duped wrote: post #184
aflag wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should be able to know all the references to a variable, if you are careful when writing your program. Also, you could write a destructor that scrambles the memory location before the object is collected. However, you would still not have control over copies that the GC may decide to make and it is a bit trickier to force a free, since the GC is in no obligation of freeing an object as soon as it has no more refe…

> Also, you could write a destructor that scrambles the memory location before the object is collected. This assumes you can write destructor at all and that it's run deterministically. > though you can probably force that to happen in most GCed languages I'd actually be surprised if any GC'd language allows this. You normally need to resort to different kinds of tricks for RAII-like behavior.

Java has try-with-resources for this. Python has with. Unlike say C++ you do have to indent your code once for every such resource though which can be cumbersome.

Re: I Lost All Faith in LastPass

#234

Post by aflag »

duped wrote: post #184
aflag wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should be able to know all the references to a variable, if you are careful when writing your program. Also, you could write a destructor that scrambles the memory location before the object is collected. However, you would still not have control over copies that the GC may decide to make and it is a bit trickier to force a free, since the GC is in no obligation of freeing an object as soon as it has no more refe…

> Also, you could write a destructor that scrambles the memory location before the object is collected. This assumes you can write destructor at all and that it's run deterministically. > though you can probably force that to happen in most GCed languages I'd actually be surprised if any GC'd language allows this. You normally need to resort to different kinds of tricks for RAII-like behavior.

Python has `gc.collect` which should work for user created types. Besides, it does have a reference counting GC. So, as long as you don't create cycles, you should be able to force the collection of objects similarly to C++'s shared_ptr.

Re: I Lost All Faith in LastPass

#235

Post by zopa »

shakow wrote: post #146
zopa wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it is: an appeal to authority is not a valid step in a deductive logical argument, unless you have somehow established that the authority in question is literally infallible. Now, it's grounds for an (extremely) persuasive inference! And we know very little of what we consider known by strict deductive logic: we rely on weaker inferential reasoning the vast majority of the time. Grandparent's "means almost nothi…

> Sure it is: an appeal to authority is not a valid step in a deductive logical argument Technically, unless you reinvented logic on your own, this in an argument of authority with extra steps.

If we're talking about fallacies, we're invoking old-fashioned classical logic.

The nice thing about having a notion of strict deductive reasoning is that it gives you an idea of what arguments might persuade someone of basic good faith, but who very much doesn't want to be persuaded. If you and your interlocutor don't both accept modus ponens then you won't get anywhere, but that's pretty unlikely in practice.

(And I'd actually argue that we each invent logic on our own and then notice that the logics are equivalent, but that's straying into metaphysics.)

Re: I Lost All Faith in LastPass

#236

Post by ScoutOrgo »

mattwad wrote: post #157
olkingcole wrote: post #141

Thoughts on Bitwarden vs 1Password? I have seen them both suggested by users on this site.

Not sure about 1Password, but I am using Bitwarden free and there's no authenticator app. I just use Authy on Android, though, it works great

Does bitwarden work well with autofill? Lastpass was awful with that and very finicky.

Re: I Lost All Faith in LastPass

#237

Post by [deleted] »

grecy wrote: post #61
jrochkind1 wrote: post #46

> I'm less thrilled about it being written in a garbage collected language What are the security problems with garbage-collected languages? (not being sarcastic, don't have an agenda, I have no previous knowledge on this, and am not a security expert. Just had never heard this suggested before, and am curious what he meant. Legit question!)

> What are the security problems with garbage-collected languages? None that I'm aware of. I think this is a petty swipe at programmers who use garbage-collected languages, implying they're "less" than programmers who use "real" languages that don't have garbage collection.

[deleted]

Re: I Lost All Faith in LastPass

#238

Post by aflag »

nebulous1 wrote: post #150
acatton wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually security nuts like to override the clear-text string with zeros or random characters before calling free() on it. This way, if this chunk of data stays in memory (which is most likely the case with libc's free()) it cannot be read by exploiting a buffer overflow. With garbage collected language, programmers don't know when their variable is "free()ed", since it could be held in multiple thread, and the last t…

Can we not simply overwrite the the data when we're "done" with it and then not worry about when it's actually unallocated by the GC?

The GC may copy data around, though. So, when you scramble the data there may be already be copies of the previous value in memory. I think that's the biggest drawback.

Re: I Lost All Faith in LastPass

#239

Post by im3w1l »

tredre3 wrote: post #88
jrochkind1 wrote: post #46

> I'm less thrilled about it being written in a garbage collected language What are the security problems with garbage-collected languages? (not being sarcastic, don't have an agenda, I have no previous knowledge on this, and am not a security expert. Just had never heard this suggested before, and am curious what he meant. Legit question!)

I suppose it's a lot more difficult to wipe memory clean in a garbage collected language. For example: password = "my-secret-password"; // do stuff then remove the pass from memory password = "" or null or delete or unset We have no guarantee that the first string "my-secret-password" will be collected and removed any time soon whereas in C or C++ we could just memset it before freeing it. But that feels like a very…

Technically C/C++ have an as-if rule (the optimizer can do whatever it wants as long as the program behaves as-if it ran the source code provided) that allows the optimizer to create cached copies and/or omit the memset. There is no way to express in C/C++ that all traces of a given variable should be removed. Though I guess there are constructs that work well enough in practice and you can always check the generated assembly.

Re: I Lost All Faith in LastPass

#240

Post by Octokiddie »

> ... Padding oracle vulnerabilities, use of ECB mode (leaks information about password length and which passwords in the vault are similar/the same. recently switched to unauthenticated CBC, which isn't much better, plus old entries will still be encrypted with ECB mode), vault key uses AES256 but key is derived from only 128 bits of entropy, encryption key leaked through webui, silent KDF downgrade, KDF hash leaked in log files, they even roll their own version of AES - they essentially commit every "crypto 101" sin. All of these are trivial to identify (and fix!) by anyone with even basic familiarity with cryptography, and it's frankly appalling that an alleged security company whose product hinges on cryptography would have such glaring errors. ...

Seems bad.

I took the author's advice and did the google search "jeremi gosney" + "lastpass". This 2015 article turned up:

> A longtime LastPass user himself, Gosney says he doesn’t plan to change a thing following the breach – not even his master password. “I am confident in the strength of my master password. As a password cracker, I know it’s impossible to crack,” he says.

https://www.secureidnews.com/news-item/consultant-dont-sweat...

When the same author now recommends Bitwardenen and 1Password, it's hard to view it as anything other than more of the same.

The author might want to tone down the unqualified language around computer security to avoid history repeating itself.

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