51–60 of 231 posts
And I thought I was safe using Keepass on Dropbox. Any recommendations for password managing?
Password Safe is supposed to be the strongest. I like KeePass 2's user interface a _lot_ better, which is why I'd originally migrated away from Password Safe. However, due to KDBX4's inability to detect data corruption, I plan to migrate back to Password Safe in the very near future.
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The array comparison? It's literally the textbook example of a timing sidechannel. Though I won't speculate if it's a real problem here, since I have no idea what data is being compared.
Do you care about that kind of side channel for an offline vault? If your adversaries are on your box while you operate your vault, then you have already lost because they will also have keyloggers, strace, etc.
"On The Security of Password Manager Database Formats" ( https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/files/6487/pwvault.pdf ) was a good review of KeePass, Password Safe, and others. As I understood it, only Password Safe provided both secrecy and data authenticity.
Step-1: open the above PDF. Step-2: search for "HMAC". Step-3: note which application uses HMAC. Step-4: you should prefer (3) to all others.
"On The Security of Password Manager Database Formats" ( https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/files/6487/pwvault.pdf ) was a good review of KeePass, Password Safe, and others. As I understood it, only Password Safe provided both secrecy and data authenticity.
That said, even PassWord safe has some issues. As the article points out, it computes an HMAC over the unencripted contents instead of over the encrypted ones. Encrypt-and-MAC isn't broken like MAC-then-encrypt but its still not as ideal as Encrypt-then-MAC.
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Philbarr is correct. The pattern they are using is fundamentally supposed to provide a thread-safe Singleton, and it fails to do that. Is that a security problem in this specific context? No. But it's a "No" because the authors are lucky in this case - not because they are competent. Now, that's just one instance of poor skill. There are many more. Are you sure none of them have security implications?
That's quite harsh. I guess you verified that there are actually different threads able to access this code before making such a statement? For instance, if I make a single-threaded application in the first place then I don't care about thread-safety at all. Because I am not going to need it.
And in all likelihood it is thread-safe - but that's due to being lucky - not competent.
The larger issue is that we have a widely-used crypto software which is clearly (1) not designed well; (2) not implemented well.
How much trust one is willing to place into current and future versions by the same author(s) is up to you.
Ok, your password database was affected by malicious modification. So what? How it can break the confidentiality of your data? Update: By the way, what's wrong with the bytearray compare code snippet?
And I thought I was safe using Keepass on Dropbox. Any recommendations for password managing?
As someone who works in the security industry, I use LastPass and recommend it to everyone. It's no less safe than anything else + Dropbox (I really recommend against using Dropbox... use something like SpiderOak. Dropbox is not meant to be a secure file store) and the convenience is outstanding. Convenient security that everyone uses is much better than inconvenient security that no one uses. And something + Dropbox is pretty inconvenient once you're used to LastPass.
"On The Security of Password Manager Database Formats" ( https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/files/6487/pwvault.pdf ) was a good review of KeePass, Password Safe, and others. As I understood it, only Password Safe provided both secrecy and data authenticity.
Step-1: open the above PDF. Step-2: search for "HMAC". Step-3: note which application uses HMAC. Step-4: you should prefer (3) to all others.
And I thought I was safe using Keepass on Dropbox. Any recommendations for password managing?
It is basically a set of shell scripts on top of gpg, simple and very easy to back up using Dropbox/Bittorrent Sync.
You can also copy just one website over to a new computer easily since each website is a single plaintext file in your ~/.password-store directory.
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Why do you say TrueCrypt isn't safe? I only skimmed the audit, but it seemed to have an overall positive impression, no?
Well I believe it is safe for my personal purpose but if you read the note the author left on Truecrypt website/software you can clearly read : WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues If I recall the audit was positive but who knows why this message was plastered everywhere when "they" decided to call it quits.
Because "they" are no longer updating it and at some point there will be security issues that will go unfixed.
Same thing with Windows XP. It didn't immediately fall apart when support ended, but we were pushing so hard for it to go away because it would never see another security update. It's just really, really bad practice to use something that will never be updated, especially a security product.