LastPass says DevOps engineer’s hacked computer led to security breach in 2022 • Hacker News Board

Re: LastPass says DevOps engineer’s hacked computer led to security breach in 2022

#251

Post by paradox242 » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 5:11 AM UTC

execveat wrote: post #137

gavanm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've already included the answer - "using their machines as remote terminals, doing most their actual work on some remote server". The developer uses MFA (TOTP, Push Notification, Yubikey etc) into a virtual desktop inside the organisation (Citrix, VMWare Horizon, etc). From there, the developer can SSH / whatever into their development environment - which is hosted "inside" the corporate network, or their cloud pr…

I'm all in for VM based privilege separation, but that won't protect you from infected endpoint. Assuming this was a targeted attack, folks that achieved RCE on DevOp engineer's machine could have waited for her to authenticate and then inject keystrokes into VM, SSH, VNC, Remote Desktop, Citrix or whatever remote management system they're using. Honestly, this HN thread is full of bad advice and factually incorrect…

Glad to see someone else with the same reaction, because a lot of this advice is... interesting, like people who are worried about keyloggers but think the clipboard is safe.

Re: LastPass says DevOps engineer’s hacked computer led to security breach in 2022

#252

Post by remram » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 5:25 AM UTC

misto wrote: post #246

remram wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with system administrator? IT specialist? Cloud engineer? Reliability expert? There are many options that don't tack "dev" into your non-dev job titles.

Did you even read my comment? None of your provided alternatives solve the issue of the current market being in demand of such a wide set of skills outside of the "normal software development" practice (whatever that even is), that labeling all of those under whatever title will get some people butthurt. If its a matter of gatekeeping the "developer" status, go read some actual job posts with the title DevOps in them…

If you start on that tone, you get what you ask for. I will obviously not read this comment.

Re: LastPass says DevOps engineer’s hacked computer led to security breach in 2022

#253

Post by Thorrez » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 6:47 AM UTC

secabeen wrote: post #245

Thorrez wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a keypass plugin that allows you to encrypt and decrypt your database with HOTP. I doubt it has much usage. It seems really inconvenient, and also potentially dangerous, because if your HOTP provider gets too far ahead of your database (you press the button too many times, or typo too many times), you permanently lose access to your data. You would want a HOTP provider that supports rewinding to avoid that pr…

Indeed. That's a neat plugin, each time you lock the database, it rolls forward your HOTP key some number of rounds, then uses the results of those rounds to encrypt a piece of key material for the vault. Then, when you go to decrypt, as long as your HOTP app hasn't generated more than the number of rounds it rolled forward, it can generate the decryption key from the HOTP stream and decrypt the vault. A little fragi…

>There's probably a creative protection here where each key is encrypted individually, but you'd still need some solution like the above HOTP trick or the attacker could scrape the key information out of memory, then decrypt each entry individually.

It seems to me like that would require a separate HOTP device for each password database entry, otherwise the malware can steal one HOTP token and use it against a different entry.

Re: LastPass says DevOps engineer’s hacked computer led to security breach in 2022

#254

Post by Thorrez » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 6:54 AM UTC

bobleeswagger wrote: post #244

Thorrez wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You expect 2FA to be used for decryption? I'm not aware of any system with that does that that has any significant amount of usage. Even if the 2FA was used for decryption, it wouldn't really make you much safer, because malware can steal the decrypted vault out of memory right after you type in the 2FA. A HSM would solve this, as long as the HSM has some out of band way to communicate with the user, such as an appro…

> Even if the 2FA was used for decryption, it wouldn't really make you much safer If the second factor is stripped for some arbitrary time, you don't have 2FA anymore. Your argument that "any adversary can read the vault from memory" is a weak one, we might as well not have passwords with that attitude. The point of a second factor is that BOTH need to be present to get to the secrets. If one of those factors is stri…

>Your argument that "any adversary can read the vault from memory" is a weak one, we might as well not have passwords with that attitude.

It all comes down to threat model. If you don't have malware on your machine, 2FA and passwords are quite useful. If you do have malware on your machine, they're basically useless. This is basically the same for any service. Name one website or program that's safe even if you have malware on your machine.

>If one of those factors is stripped away for "convenience" we're misunderstanding the point of 2FA entirely. I can't make this any clearer.

It's not for convenience. It's because there's no practical way to implement encryption/decryption with 2FA. You seem to think there's some practical way to do it, but there isn't.

Lastpass 2FA protects against the threat model of an attacker who has stolen your password. In that case, the attacker cannot steal the contents of your database because the attacker can't get any form of the database, encrypted or decrypted due to not having the 2FA. Unfortunately now that an attacker has stolen all the encrypted databases by compromising Lastpass itself, this threat model is no longer realistic against this one specific attacker or any attackers that this attacker shares the loot with, because they now all have your encrypted database.

Re: LastPass says DevOps engineer’s hacked computer led to security breach in 2022

#255

Post by forty » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 7:37 AM UTC

secabeen wrote: post #221

forty wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't store the encrypted passwords locally. Have them on a server that deliver them only against a valid otp/push notification confirmation on your phone/yubikey tap etc.

That's a valid solution, but I would not select a password vault that was dependent on network access. Offline access to secrets is important to me. Other people might feel differently, of course.

Absolutely agree with you. No offline access was one of the usability trade off I was referring to, that no one seems ready to make in practice.

The product I'm working on have had for a long time an option to require a second factor for each login which works a bit as at described (encrypted data are stored locally but also encrypted with a key that's stored on our servers and protected by 2fa), but at the vault level, rather than at the credential level (it doesn't protect against device compromise, but prevents brute forcing of local data for exemple. You do lose offline access) and the UX is already annoying enough that in practice this feature is very rarely used and we are regularly considering dropping it.

Re: LastPass says DevOps engineer’s hacked computer led to security breach in 2022

#256

Post by forty » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 7:46 AM UTC

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #241

forty wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a LastPass competitor. As far as I know, no popular password manager seriously includes "fully compromised local device" in their threat model. I don't think it can be done without hurting seriously usability (like having one 2fa verification each time you use a credential would work) and the predictable outcome of hurting usability too much is that people will find more handy insecure ways to store their…

1Password has become really onerous to use in these days of Javascript front ends and PWA's that do norm-breaking things to the UI in a browser. I often get stuck in some sort of crazy loop trying to authenticate the browser plugin versus the app, and then have more frustrations with taps in the apps being re-captured back from the plugin. If any more frustration gets added to the workflow than I'm already experienci…

Unfortunately I'm not sure I'm going to manage to sell you our product (and won't even make you the offense to try): we decided to drop our desktop apps alltogether a few years ago and we only have a browser plugin now. Also I don't think we support yubikey login anymore as a result :/ (which I think is what you are referring to by "tap").

I hope you find a product that works for you!

Re: LastPass says DevOps engineer’s hacked computer led to security breach in 2022

#257

Post by bobleeswagger » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 2:03 PM UTC

razemio wrote: post #247

bobleeswagger wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To my knowledge it isn't possible to protect a file with a rotating key. This is my point, it is an implementation detail of the password manager to integrate OTP or another second with decryption of the vault. Any password manager can implement this. From the perspective of the user, you are stripping a factor for some arbitrary period of time. It's a broken implementation.

That is not correct. You can not have offline caching and otp enabled at the same time. That is why things like yubikey exist. If your are not using another 2fa method besides otp it's either the security risk or entering otp each time you access the vault. Obviously the later is not feasible.

> You can not have offline caching and otp enabled at the same time.

I'm not sure why you are having such a hard time understanding this is an implementation detail of the password manager that can change at any time. You are treating this like it cannot be implemented differently. It absolutely can.

Re: LastPass says DevOps engineer’s hacked computer led to security breach in 2022

#258

Post by bobleeswagger » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

Thorrez wrote: post #254

bobleeswagger wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if the 2FA was used for decryption, it wouldn't really make you much safer If the second factor is stripped for some arbitrary time, you don't have 2FA anymore. Your argument that "any adversary can read the vault from memory" is a weak one, we might as well not have passwords with that attitude. The point of a second factor is that BOTH need to be present to get to the secrets. If one of those factors is stri…

>Your argument that "any adversary can read the vault from memory" is a weak one, we might as well not have passwords with that attitude. It all comes down to threat model. If you don't have malware on your machine, 2FA and passwords are quite useful. If you do have malware on your machine, they're basically useless. This is basically the same for any service. Name one website or program that's safe even if you have…

> You seem to think there's some practical way to do it, but there isn't.

It is an implementation detail of the password manager itself. Any password manager can update their implementation to ensure the second factor is always needed when decrypting the vault. I'm not sure why you think this is an impossible feat. It's a choice that can be made.

Re: LastPass says DevOps engineer’s hacked computer led to security breach in 2022

#259

Post by bobleeswagger » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 2:10 PM UTC

Thorrez wrote: post #253

secabeen wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. That's a neat plugin, each time you lock the database, it rolls forward your HOTP key some number of rounds, then uses the results of those rounds to encrypt a piece of key material for the vault. Then, when you go to decrypt, as long as your HOTP app hasn't generated more than the number of rounds it rolled forward, it can generate the decryption key from the HOTP stream and decrypt the vault. A little fragi…

>There's probably a creative protection here where each key is encrypted individually, but you'd still need some solution like the above HOTP trick or the attacker could scrape the key information out of memory, then decrypt each entry individually. It seems to me like that would require a separate HOTP device for each password database entry, otherwise the malware can steal one HOTP token and use it against a differ…

> It seems to me like that would require a separate HOTP device for each password database entry

That would be a paranoid level of implementation. As it sits, the HOTP device is only _sometimes_ needed depending on the caching policy. Fix that broken implementation first, then we can figure out how to update the threat model to account for an adversary that has already infected your computer.

Re: LastPass says DevOps engineer’s hacked computer led to security breach in 2022

#260

Post by j45 » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 4:42 PM UTC

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #76

oceanplexian wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't understand the point of these cloud password managers. Use something like KeepassX. Encrypt it with AES256, upload it to Dropbox, Google Drive, whatever. I personally throw the encrypted p/w file in an encrypted MacOS disk image with a secondary, separate memorized passphrase as well. Literally solves the problem without having to trust or pay some random sketchy service.

Sharing with family sucks with these. No permission control and no simultaneous write from multiple devices make those unusable

Wouldn't most of the use cases be reading, instead of writing?

I have seen people create multiple files on a share that works fine. I wasn't too keen on it at first but it did seem to work OK.