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LessPass: sync-less open source password manager

lesspass.com

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Re: LessPass: sync-less open source password manager

#31
post #29

When I find stuff like this that uses SHA256, I instantly just tune out. SHA256 is stupid. Use SHA512 or find another line of work. SHA512 is astronomically more secure. Anyone who is using anything less than SHA512 for hashing is an idiot.

I think my passwords are far less interesting for an attacker than the Bitcoin block chain. And it's integrity is based upon sha256.

Re: LessPass: sync-less open source password manager

#33
I've used PasswordMaker in the past which uses the same concept but recently moved away from it. Changing passwords is a pain as you now have to remember special parameters for certain pages. Even worse, in case of a compromise of your master password, you're toast. The same is true when losing your password manager database + credentials, but at least you will have a list of all your compromised records which you would have to keep separate in this case.

I've moved to KeeWeb since then + CPK for Chrome and Keepass2Android on my phone and couldn't be happier.

Re: LessPass: sync-less open source password manager

#35
While the idea sounds alright (and I've seen similar ideas done before), there are a few problems with this system that make me quite cautious about trying it:

* In order to handle different password complexities, regeneration of passwords and similar setting, you have to use a "connected" version (read: you have to store the configuration). In addition, the configuration they have includes potentially sensitive information (password length, number of times password was changed, list of websites I use, my username on the site). And currently those profiles are unencrypted. So you in order for it to be useful it's no longer sync-less. As an aside, my bank (foolishly) uses my generated username as a "privileged" piece of information -- which means that I literally could not use this manager for my bank.

* You can't change your master password without updating all of your site passwords. This also means you can't import your old passwords without just changing them all. IMO this makes LessPass not a password "manager". It's a password generator.

* Also, the profile doesn't appear to contain any configuration details for the PBKDF, which seems like a bad idea (it means that they can never practically update the PBKDF without introducing backwards compatibility in the profile settings). Also not sure why they're using SHA when there are better password hashing algorithms.

* Aliases are impossible to implement (without adding more information to the profile), which just makes this impossible to use with SSO systems (I'm not going to remember which of the 5 different hostnames I used to generate a password I use once a year).

I've got to admit that I kinda like the symbols shown next to your password to make sure you're using the right master password, but there doesn't seem to be any description how that's generated. My guess is that it's similar to SSH keyart (which then brings up the question how often will collisions happen with only X^3 options, and can you have two passwords result in different orderings of the same tokens).

Overall, seems like an okay idea. But I would prefer if someone just offered a nice way to host your KeePass databases (or rather if there was an app that did it). You could probably do it with git and push to GitLab or something, but that is just ugly to do manually.

Re: LessPass: sync-less open source password manager

#37

This one isn't bad either https://keeweb.info/

This looks really nice as well, is there a catch? Why would I pay for eg LastPass?

This is another GUI on top of KeePass' protocol, it's not a completely different password manager. Open source, built on top of Electron (IIRC), and there is no cost of using it.

Re: LessPass: sync-less open source password manager

#38
How do you deal with sites whose password requirements don't match the output of LessPass? How do you handle the fact that sites want you to change your password? Yes. There's a counter field, but how do you know what site uses what version of the counter? How do you change the master password without having to change all passwords?

Thing is: There's a solution for all these problems: All you have to do is actually generating a random password and store that (in-fact, that's the solution proposed by LessPass to use for these special cases. But if you have storage for the special cases, why not just store the passwords to begin with?)

You don't want to sync it because you don't trust the client-side encryption used in all the managers out there? Use a piece of paper to write the passwords down. Or use a device you constantly carry with you as your password store.

While there are tons of workarounds for the issues of stateful password managers, there are none for the stateless ones (aside of storing the state somewhere, but if you're doing that, why not just store the password?)

Re: LessPass: sync-less open source password manager

#39
I started using Nic Wolff's password generator[0] to solve that very problem, but I noticed that the need for connected passwords makes up a large size of the passwords that I needed to use, so I gave up on the idea of "store nothing passwords". The idea of generating always the same password for the same site is also doesn't work, because of database breaches, so in the end I created a program[1] that did all the things I needed. Check the README to know how it works.

[0] - http://angel.net/~nic/passwd.current.html

[1] - https://github.com/marceloslacerda/password_generator

Re: LessPass: sync-less open source password manager

#40
It's great people are exploring this problem space, but so far nothing comes close to https://www.passwordstore.org/ which is just a wrapper around gpg and git. It has Android/iOS clients, as well as GUI clients.

On Android I use Password Store + OpenKeychain, the UX with a YubiKey is very smooth.

https://fossdroid.com/a/openkeychain.html https://fossdroid.com/a/password-store.html

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