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The situation at LastPass may be worse than they are letting on

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Re: The situation at LastPass may be worse than they are letting on

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why, but I'm still a bit afraid of using security key everywhere. I have an irrational fear of losing/breaking my security key. Even though I know my phone is fine and always with me (as a comparison). I just set up a whole backup solution for my many self hosted applications, all encrypted with the keys safely in my password manager. Even uploaded to S3, because I figured if I'm paying for it, I could I…

One option is to have two identical security keys. In general, you can't easily read the secrets from an existing key, but you can overwrite/initialize them to get two with identical data.

Is this possible with Yubikeys? I'd be very interested if so. "Two identical Yubikeys" is something I've wanted for a long time.

Re: The situation at LastPass may be worse than they are letting on

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One option is to have two identical security keys. In general, you can't easily read the secrets from an existing key, but you can overwrite/initialize them to get two with identical data.

Is this possible with Yubikeys? I'd be very interested if so. "Two identical Yubikeys" is something I've wanted for a long time.

IIRC https://www.yubico.com/support/download/yubikey-personalizat... could be used for that.

Re: The situation at LastPass may be worse than they are letting on

#413

This is ultimately a predictable outcome for any password manager that stores your credentials on someone else's server. Just like they say in crypto "not your keys, not your crypto" - it applies here too. Not your storage, not your passwords. KeePass on an airgapped box, or an encrypted hardware password manager with no network interfaces is best, though frankly, I'd even be more comfortable writing down passwords o…

A password manager is probably the worst possible candidate for being a cloud service. "Your entire list of passwords" is the one piece of data you absolutely, positively, do NOT want stored in the cloud. How these things gained such a following is mind-blowing.

Re: The situation at LastPass may be worse than they are letting on

#414
post #158

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They weren't really credentials, but keys. Pop those into any compatible wallet and you control the money now. If someone had put the key in the URL field (because there is no corresponding URL because it's not a credential), and the URL field was unencrypted, that could account for it.

I suspect people use secure notes to store crypto keys.

You would hope, but I've been working in customer/technical support in the crypto industry since early 2017. People are not remotely as careful as you would expect (and hope for) them to be.

Re: The situation at LastPass may be worse than they are letting on

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you just solved the inconvenience problem.

How is your setup though? Can you describe it in more detail please? Interested in the perspective of a security professional.

For personal use, I use KeePass on my "offline box", which is an airgapped machine running Qubes with full disk encryption. KeePass is in it's own Qube, along with a few other offline things in their own qubes (hash cracking, archival storage for old media/files/projects, offline copy of wikipedia, offline maps/nav, tons of old training content for certs, so on and so forth).

Is it inconvenient at times? Yes. But I spend so much time at my desk, that those times aren't super common.

On mobile, my personal daily driver is running GrapheneOS, but I do not keep my passwords on it.

I am unaffiliated with them, and this isn't an endorsement, but I just recently ordered a Mooltipass, which I intend to thoroughly audit. If it's security proves satisfactory to me, I may use one going forward in a limited capacity.

Re: The situation at LastPass may be worse than they are letting on

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A _random_ 16-character password from all character types can't be brute-forced. A password made from common dictionary words, with numbers substituted in with l33tsp3ak, and an exclamation mark on the end, is a different story. Passwords like that would be sitting in precomputed hash lists already.

The hash would only be sitting in precomputed lists if LastPass did not salt the passwords first. It's my understanding that they did.

Ah, we both went on a tangent. The password in question is to the twitterer's LastPass vault, and so a precomputed hash list would be of no use, and since it's an encryption key and not a hash, there is nothing to salt.

I suppose the point was more that faced with many users' LastPass vaults there are more likely and less likely keys -- but they'll still have to try the keys.

Re: The situation at LastPass may be worse than they are letting on

#417
post #185

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Most services allow you to enrol two or more security keys, so you wouldn't need to overwrite one.

The problem with that is that it requires to have all these security keys available in order to enrol them, which is not possible if you want to store one of them in a different secure location. If you have two keys in your pocket, that's not much of a backup; having two identical keys means that you can enrol the one in your pocket and if it gets lost, the copy from your safe works.

Do you sign up to new services daily? I'm thinking of it more like sign up today, store the second elsewhere and don't think about it again.

Re: The situation at LastPass may be worse than they are letting on

#418
post #160

Best to just use pass ( https://www.passwordstore.org/ ) with your own gpg key rather than rely on any 3rd party service. Then set up a git repository on a (free) google cloud instance, (or even use github/gitlab), and you're set to sync your passwords to all your devices.

This is less secure than using keepassxc, 1password, or another application with a 1st party well maintained browser extension. With keepassxc, 1password, or even chrome's password manager, if a phisher links you to "gmail.scammersite.info", even if it looks exactly like the real gmail login page, browser-integration will not fill in the password field. With pass, the default flow is to copy the password to your clip…

That’s actually part of the appeal.

Passwords are per file. Grabbing a password by a Yubikey touch doesn’t expose other passwords. Per password sandboxing. With keepass, you open the vault most of the time to expose a less important password, and the entire vault is at risk.

Beyond Pass, you should be careful with the browser extensions (and browser in general ). There are a lot of them, never audited.

Re: The situation at LastPass may be worse than they are letting on

#419
post #311

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> When I see a project with a massive disclaimer about "this crypto is not audited, I'm a noob never deploy this anywhere" I'm likely to see better crypto than most of the commercial products I work with, including ones with sales people that talk about unbreakable crypto. I'm working on an opensource project for Linux users that needs crypto. Needless to say, I'm not an expert in that domain. I was planning to ask e…

Use available and widely used libraries for the low level crypto parts (e.g. don't code RSA or key generation on your own). Apart from that, get audits if you have the means but I guess using libraries like openssl should be enough for most open source projects.

> Use available and widely used libraries for the low level crypto parts (e.g. don't code RSA or key generation on your own).

Yes. That's the plan. I'm using Rust's crypto libraries. All the code in the application are basically just calls to those libs.

> Apart from that, get audits if you have the means

Unfortunately no. But I got the plan from a crypto forum. I will be seeking their validation when it's done.

Re: The situation at LastPass may be worse than they are letting on

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is their actually a technical reason to believe they are better than Lastpass or any of their competition (have they like open sourced all their stuff?). You can see their server and client code here: https://github.com/bitwarden I choose to use their clients unmodified, along with an instance of the server formerly known as "bitwarden_rs" running in my basement as the sync backend. https://github.com/dani-garcia/v…

Do you expose your server to the internet or is it ok to sync devices only when you’re at home? Is every device a replica, if you lose your server can you redeploy it from the data on your device?

I currently have my server at home connected via wireguard to a VPS. On that VPS, I run Caddy and have it reverse proxy back to my server over wireguard.

If I were building it out today I might just use tailscale and be done with it.

I'm not sure about whether every device is a replica of the server. I believe that's the case (given how they behave when the server is offline) but that doesn't figure into my recovery plan.

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