How did LastPass master passwords get compromised? • Hacker News Board

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#151

Post by jmull » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 10:31 PM UTC

ViViDboarder wrote: post #103

jmull wrote: post #11

> "First of all, malware provides a level of access that makes hacking LastPass accounts unnecessary. If it can intercept or extract the LastPass master password, it can do the same for all other passwords as well." That logic doesn't really make sense. Malware might make hacking LastPass accounts unnecessary, but it would still be highly desirable (one target gives you everything else). Frankly, it feels like OP dec…

The additional justification there seems to ring true to me at least. If you had machine access, why not download the database from the “trusted” (compromised) machine? Why not extract the plain text passwords when they unlock their vault? How would it impact users who hadn’t logged into their accounts in years? Malware doesn’t seem to fit to me.

Consider if you have key logger logs you’d like to profit from. What do you look for? Login credentials is a good idea… which login credentials should you target? Password manager credentials seem like a good idea, since that gives you full login details for anything else else you might want.

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#152

Post by yonixw » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 10:40 PM UTC

Dedime wrote: post #128

This whole LastPass kerfuffle has solidified my choice to continue using FOSS + self hosted password managers only. If my passwords get stolen, I'd rather be responsible for the loss than wait for a company to put out a squirrely statement.

I was self-hosted enthusiast myself, until I found out that self-updating is not fun, not always compatible and thus not secure*. And therefore, I take the hard pill of SaaS even if security wise, it is hard to swallow.

*Not secure: It will always catch you off guard, and will require a lot of work, so you will postpone it which is, not secure.

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#153

Post by joenathanone » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 10:40 PM UTC

foobiekr wrote: post #130

joenathanone wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They *need* to go into great detail if people are supposed to trust them with their digital life. That statement isn't nearly enough.

After all the problems with lastpass, who was even trusting them at this point?

I could see if you were a big company, trying to migrate a bunch of users and retrain them on a new password manager would be costly, there are probably admins out there looking for any reason not to make the move, but at this point, I think they have lost all credibility.

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#154

Post by jeremyjh » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 10:49 PM UTC

helloworld11 wrote: post #148

I never trusted or used LastPass and others of this type for this very reason. Powerful passwords created by a single central expert source? Sounds great, very secure, except for the little tiny detail of that source being broken wide open despite its claims of excellent security. It's impressive how many supposedly tech-oriented people on this very site and its comments I've frequently seen recommending such an obvi…

For the majority of people it is still better than the only alternative they would actually use: using the same password in a lot of different websites. This way there is only one company that can completely compromise you, instead of dozens.

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#155

Post by mafuy » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 11:04 PM UTC

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #87

chowells wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analysis seems to overlook an important detail in that first bullet point - dictionary attacks are only feasible when the KDF is fast. Authentication servers tend to require the KDF to be fast so they aren't constantly performing a denial of service attack on themselves. What people are looking for is a way to make the combined KDF slow by pushing most of the work to the client side. If this succeeds, you have m…

This is an interesting point. I'd be inclined to ensure that the server side hash is still at least independently expensive enough as would be desirable for plain text, but then using the client side hash to go above and beyond computationally seems reasonable to me. I would wonder though -- there's obviously a practical limit on user experience for waiting for computation, and is there really fast enough implementat…

> that the server side hash is still at least independently expensive enough

That is useless if a hash of the passphrase is sent by the client. The input space is evenly distributed over all hash values, so a dictionary attack is no better than sending all possible hashes directly (brute force).

A single round of server side hash suffices here.

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#156

Post by Strom » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 11:07 PM UTC

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #87

chowells wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analysis seems to overlook an important detail in that first bullet point - dictionary attacks are only feasible when the KDF is fast. Authentication servers tend to require the KDF to be fast so they aren't constantly performing a denial of service attack on themselves. What people are looking for is a way to make the combined KDF slow by pushing most of the work to the client side. If this succeeds, you have m…

This is an interesting point. I'd be inclined to ensure that the server side hash is still at least independently expensive enough as would be desirable for plain text, but then using the client side hash to go above and beyond computationally seems reasonable to me. I would wonder though -- there's obviously a practical limit on user experience for waiting for computation, and is there really fast enough implementat…

> is there really fast enough implementations available to the browser

Browsers have pretty good support for surfacing native code SHA family hash functions which you can use to speed up PBKDF2. It's called the Web Crypto API and it's available even in Internet Explorer 11. [1]

If you're willing to drop support for IE11 and 10+ year old phones like the iPhone 4S, then you get access to WebAssembly. With WASM you can get a bunch of custom algorithms to be quite fast. The Argon2 browser WASM library claims to be only about 10x slower than optimized native code. [2]

It's not perfect, but it isn't as bad as it used to be with just pure JavaScript.

--

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Crypto_...

[2] https://github.com/antelle/argon2-browser

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#157

Post by ritmatter » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 11:17 PM UTC

Using 2FA with LastPass (Google Authenticator) makes me feel a lot better about the security. Even if my password were compromised, it would still be hard for an attacker to get access to my LastPass account.

Note that 2FA with SMS is much less safe than a code generator app, since it is much easier for someone to get access to your phone number than to get access to the code generator.

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#158

Post by op00to » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 11:21 PM UTC

noah_buddy wrote: post #136

nmca wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide some? I have previously only heard "santa".

JFK, 9/11, and Epstein spring to mind for major conspiracies. I think anyone with a head on can see the government bodies tasked to investigate those affairs were rife with conflicted interests, duplicitous individuals, and some intent that they should be as narrow investigations as possible. Those secrets have been kept or at the very least the limited hangout worked so well that people think only nuts question them…

What about “JFK”? What’s special about the fraction 9/11? Are we talking Epstein from welcome back kotter?

You sound paranoid.

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#159

Post by askvictor » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 11:21 PM UTC

While trying to delete my lastpass account (which repeatedly comes up with an error, though may have actually deleted it, but now I'm no longer sure and can't verify), I've just discovered that, when trying to log in to Lastpass, it tells you if you have the username incorrect, not "either username or password" is incorrect; I thought standard security practice of the last decade was the latter :-/

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#160

Post by imwillofficial » Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 11:31 PM UTC

op00to wrote: post #158

noah_buddy wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JFK, 9/11, and Epstein spring to mind for major conspiracies. I think anyone with a head on can see the government bodies tasked to investigate those affairs were rife with conflicted interests, duplicitous individuals, and some intent that they should be as narrow investigations as possible. Those secrets have been kept or at the very least the limited hangout worked so well that people think only nuts question them…

What about “JFK”? What’s special about the fraction 9/11? Are we talking Epstein from welcome back kotter? You sound paranoid.

Your comment makes no sense. Purposely muddying the waters does not move the discussion forward.