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1Password sends your password in clear text across the loopback interface

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Re: 1Password sends your password in clear text across the loopback interface

#131

Post by roustem »

ikeboy wrote: post #108
jpgoldberg wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The browser would have to hold on to the shared key long term. Where does it put this? Encrypting with a key that is available to attackers (who have the same set a privileges needed to run localhost sniffing) is not encryption. It is obfuscation.

I thought the point of the arxiv paper was that a non privileged app could effectively "sniff" by pretending to be the other app. If I'm understanding correctly, that means that encrypting with a shared key helps. Am I missing something?

1Password verifies the code signature of the apps connecting to the WebSockets server using SecCodeCheckValidity.

That would prevent connection from the apps that do not have their code signature whitelisted.

Re: 1Password sends your password in clear text across the loopback interface

#132

Post by jpgoldberg »

nullrouted wrote: post #119
jpgoldberg wrote: post #47

[Disclosure: I work for AgileBits, the makers of 1Password] We've talked about this several times, most recently was in June. Please see https://blog.agilebits.com/2015/06/17/1password-inter-proces... This falls into the question of what can we do to prevent attacks from malicious processes running on the user's machine. For the most part, we do try to defend against something where we can. For example, we take steps…

Author here: Thank you for responding. The reason I wrote this up is not to let people oh my god the world is ending but to let them know, hey if you are using the browser extension there is clear text passwords being sent over the loopback, if you don't like that then don't use their extensions. You have made very well informed arguments about how hard it is to protect if someone has access to your machine, specific…

And now my reply to your first point. Thank you for letting people know that this interprocess communication is readable by something running as root on the user's machine. For those interested in this, please see an article we posted about this back in June: https://blog.agilebits.com/2015/06/17/1password-inter-proces...

We try to be very clear and open about the choices that we've made in our security design, why we made them, and what the implications for users are.

Re: 1Password sends your password in clear text across the loopback interface

#133

Post by kentonv »

nullrouted wrote: post #119
jpgoldberg wrote: post #47

[Disclosure: I work for AgileBits, the makers of 1Password] We've talked about this several times, most recently was in June. Please see https://blog.agilebits.com/2015/06/17/1password-inter-proces... This falls into the question of what can we do to prevent attacks from malicious processes running on the user's machine. For the most part, we do try to defend against something where we can. For example, we take steps…

Author here: Thank you for responding. The reason I wrote this up is not to let people oh my god the world is ending but to let them know, hey if you are using the browser extension there is clear text passwords being sent over the loopback, if you don't like that then don't use their extensions. You have made very well informed arguments about how hard it is to protect if someone has access to your machine, specific…

I am not affiliated with 1password, but I am a security engineer.

You are asking 1password to fix a non-issue. Sniffing loopback requires root privileges on the machine. If someone can sniff loopback, they can just as easily reach directly into the 1password processes's memory and extract the password from there, or replace 1password with a malicious extension that sends all your passwords to the attacker, or just log your keypresses. These other strategies may actually be easier than sniffing loopback. There is no reasonable defense against an attacker with root access, and encrypting communications over loopback would be a complete waste of effort and CPU time.

Honestly I feel bad for 1password that this article insinuating a security issue in their product is trending on HN when there is in fact no issue (as far as I can see, from the information presented).

Re: 1Password sends your password in clear text across the loopback interface

#134

Post by ikeboy »

roustem wrote: post #131
ikeboy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the point of the arxiv paper was that a non privileged app could effectively "sniff" by pretending to be the other app. If I'm understanding correctly, that means that encrypting with a shared key helps. Am I missing something?

1Password verifies the code signature of the apps connecting to the WebSockets server using SecCodeCheckValidity. That would prevent connection from the apps that do not have their code signature whitelisted.

From the paper:

>WebSocket. WebSocket servers are typically built over a few popular opensource frameworks, such as CocoaHTTPServer [3] and QtWebKit [14]. All of them provide a receiver method for getting messages from browser extensions, which is used by Xavus to fingerprint this channel, and a response method for replying to the extensions. The invocations of these two methods are identified as the claim and the use of the channel, respectively. Between them, the server is supposed to access the HTTP header Origin that includes extension IDs attached by the browser and check the signature of the browser through the API SecCodeCheckValidity. If these operations are not found, the app is considered vulnerable to the threat from a malicious extension or app. On the other hand, the attack from a malicious server against an extension cannot be detected through any existing APIs.

This sounds to me like the app validates the extension, but the extension can't validate the app. In that case, using a shared key helps.

Re: 1Password sends your password in clear text across the loopback interface

#135

Post by nullrouted »

kentonv wrote: post #133
nullrouted wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here: Thank you for responding. The reason I wrote this up is not to let people oh my god the world is ending but to let them know, hey if you are using the browser extension there is clear text passwords being sent over the loopback, if you don't like that then don't use their extensions. You have made very well informed arguments about how hard it is to protect if someone has access to your machine, specific…

I am not affiliated with 1password, but I am a security engineer. You are asking 1password to fix a non-issue. Sniffing loopback requires root privileges on the machine. If someone can sniff loopback, they can just as easily reach directly into the 1password processes's memory and extract the password from there, or replace 1password with a malicious extension that sends all your passwords to the attacker, or just lo…

It doesn't always require root privileges...for instance if some program (wireshark) changes the permissions on your loopback. There are other questions there but I'll probably dig into it later.

The thing I guess I would say bothers me about your post is you just say well, if a person gets access to a machine it is basically all over which isn't necessarily the case. Even if they get root access we don't want to make it easy, right? Thats why we encrypt databases or in certain cases storage at rest so even if the hacker has root access it is sure going to be hard.

1Password can never absolutely protect against an attack when an attacker has root. But they can make it harder then just dumping out lo0. Level of effort does account for something.

Re: 1Password sends your password in clear text across the loopback interface

#136

Post by kentonv »

nullrouted wrote: post #135
kentonv wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not affiliated with 1password, but I am a security engineer. You are asking 1password to fix a non-issue. Sniffing loopback requires root privileges on the machine. If someone can sniff loopback, they can just as easily reach directly into the 1password processes's memory and extract the password from there, or replace 1password with a malicious extension that sends all your passwords to the attacker, or just lo…

It doesn't always require root privileges...for instance if some program (wireshark) changes the permissions on your loopback. There are other questions there but I'll probably dig into it later. The thing I guess I would say bothers me about your post is you just say well, if a person gets access to a machine it is basically all over which isn't necessarily the case. Even if they get root access we don't want to mak…

> for instance if some program (wireshark) changes the permissions on your loopback.

That would be a serious security flaw in that program. Some program could also change the permissions on /dev/mem (or really any other device), with similarly disastrous results.

You can't expect 1password to defend you against other programs disabling the security of your operating system.

> if a person gets access to a machine it is basically all over which isn't necessarily the case.

Root access with ability to run sophisticated arbitrary code is game over, period.

Things that we should actually try to defend against (somewhat) include:

- A human briefly sitting down at your machine while you go to the bathroom. (E.g. Chrome's UI that allows you to display back your saved passwords in cleartext with no challenge is a legitimate security flaw, IMO.)

- Someone physically stealing your machine and then trying to dump the disk.

- Malicious software running without priviliges.

However, malicious software running as root is game over. Sorry, it is. Trying to make it hard for such software to do bad things is simply not feasible; there are far too many avenues of attack.

> Thats why we encrypt databases or in certain cases storage at rest

No, we encrypt data at rest to defend against physical theft of the storage medium, not to defend against live running processes that have root privileges.

If a malicious process has root, your encryption is meaningless. The key is in memory somewhere. The attacker doesn't really need to know where. They can dump the entirety of memory, and then cycle through it trying every N bytes as the encryption key and see if it works. This won't take very long!

Re: 1Password sends your password in clear text across the loopback interface

#137

Post by kazinator »

julie78787 wrote: post #127
roustem wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, there is no way for browser extensions to create Unix sockets, Also, code signing would prevent anyone from modifying the binaries to change the IP address.

But even if they could, UNIX domain sockets aren't immune to attacks. That sort of the problem with "First, assume your machine has been pwn'd".

Yes; if we assume the machine has been pwned, then whatever we can still trust is anywhere else but in that machine. At best we can come up with ways to securely smuggle bits through the pwned machine between two trusted endpoints; but we cannot manipulate any secrets on that machine.

(Trusted computing relies on some tamper-resistant core of the machine not being pwned when the rest of it is pwned.)

Re: 1Password sends your password in clear text across the loopback interface

#138

Post by lttlrck »

jlgaddis wrote: post #118
msbarnett wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's that they installed Wireshark, and gave it privileges to chown the loopback interfaces. edit: Irony here is that Wireshark is doing something far more dangerous than 1password.

It's either a) change the group on the /dev/bpf entries and add your user to that group or b) run Wireshark as root.

On Linux you can give an executable admin access to network devices with setcap which narrows it down further. Is the same possible on OS X?

Edit. Actually this is worse than running as root isn't it!

Re: 1Password sends your password in clear text across the loopback interface

#139

Post by tangled_zans »

kentonv wrote: post #136
nullrouted wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't always require root privileges...for instance if some program (wireshark) changes the permissions on your loopback. There are other questions there but I'll probably dig into it later. The thing I guess I would say bothers me about your post is you just say well, if a person gets access to a machine it is basically all over which isn't necessarily the case. Even if they get root access we don't want to mak…

> for instance if some program (wireshark) changes the permissions on your loopback. That would be a serious security flaw in that program. Some program could also change the permissions on /dev/mem (or really any other device), with similarly disastrous results. You can't expect 1password to defend you against other programs disabling the security of your operating system. > if a person gets access to a machine it i…

You make some very good points. Question is, is there any way to know if such a malicious program is on your machine?

Re: 1Password sends your password in clear text across the loopback interface

#140

Post by kentonv »

tangled_zans wrote: post #139
kentonv wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for instance if some program (wireshark) changes the permissions on your loopback. That would be a serious security flaw in that program. Some program could also change the permissions on /dev/mem (or really any other device), with similarly disastrous results. You can't expect 1password to defend you against other programs disabling the security of your operating system. > if a person gets access to a machine it i…

You make some very good points. Question is, is there any way to know if such a malicious program is on your machine?

Maybe. Many will not hide themselves very well, but some use their power to make themselves invisible (often called a "rootkit"). I think the most promising approach to avoiding them is to use "secure boot" where the hardware verifies a signature on the firmware, which in turn verifies a signature on the OS, etc. ChromeOS devices (and some smartphones?) are pretty good at this. However, secure boot also prevents you, the rightful owner, from hacking (customizing) your own machine, which kind of sucks.
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