Live data from Hacker News

Password managers less secure than promised

ethz.ch

51–60 of 87 posts

Re: Password managers less secure than promised

#51
post #27

The article is nearly useless for users of the software who want to know how their data may have been affected. The researchers' website is more descriptive, especilly wrt specific findings. https://zkae.io/

That's much better, thanks. According to the Bitwarden blog post: https://bitwarden.com/blog/security-through-transparency-eth... which contains its full cryptography report at the end, all the issues have been fixed except a few which are considered part of the design (see below), so if I understand correctly you have nothing to worry about if you don't use organizations and use a strong password.

Issue 5: Organisation Key Injection (Medium)

When users interact with organizations, a trust relationship is established through the exchange of cryptographic keys. A malicious server could add users to arbitrary organizations by encrypting an organization symmetric key under the user's public key and including it in sync responses. The client would silently accept the new organization membership. Alternatively, when a user creates an organization, the malicious server could substitute the newly created organization's keys with attacker-controlled keys during the post-creation sync.

Issue 7: Disable KDF Bruteforce Protection (Low)

Bitwarden uses Password-Based Key Derivation Functions (PBKDF2 or Argon2id) to derive the master key from the user's master password. The iteration count – currently defaulting to 600,000 for PBKDF2 – provides brute-force resistance. The researchers identified that KDF settings are stored on the server without authentication, allowing a malicious server to reduce the iteration count and receive a master key hash that is faster to brute-force.

Issue 9: Malleable Vault Format and Unencrypted Metadata (Low)

The researchers identified that while individual fields are encrypted, metadata about field positions and item structure is not integrity-protected, potentially allowing field reordering or item manipulation

Issue 10: Access Violation in Organisation Collections (Low)

Organization collections enable shared access to vault items among organization members. By design, the organization symmetric key is shared with all organization members, allowing them to access collection contents to which they have specifically been granted access

Re: Password managers less secure than promised

#52
post #27

The article is nearly useless for users of the software who want to know how their data may have been affected. The researchers' website is more descriptive, especilly wrt specific findings. https://zkae.io/

Bitwarden's response [1] is interesting. "All issues have been addressed by Bitwarden. Seven of which have been resolved or are in active remediation by the Bitwarden team. The remaining three issues have been accepted as intentional design decisions necessary for product functionality. " They don't expand on what those three are. 1. https://bitwarden.com/blog/security-through-transparency-eth...

you can see them in the report at the bottom, but I counted four. See my post above.

Re: Password managers less secure than promised

#53
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What to do if my house catches on fire, including my computer where the passwords are stored?

I recently orchestrated this, although in my case I've chosen to use 1password's cloud based store as my primary secret store, so I'm accepting some exposure right off the bat that you might not be comfortable with. I've documented the recovery process here: https://docs.eblu.me/how-to/operations/restore-1password-bac... Basically, I have a borg backup job which runs every day, in a 3-2-1 replication strategy with th…

Just a heads up, Fireproof Safes are not failure proof, you should have that key securely stored somewhere else as well.

Re: Password managers less secure than promised

#54
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently orchestrated this, although in my case I've chosen to use 1password's cloud based store as my primary secret store, so I'm accepting some exposure right off the bat that you might not be comfortable with. I've documented the recovery process here: https://docs.eblu.me/how-to/operations/restore-1password-bac... Basically, I have a borg backup job which runs every day, in a 3-2-1 replication strategy with th…

Just a heads up, Fireproof Safes are not failure proof, you should have that key securely stored somewhere else as well.

Thanks, it's also available via my 1password cloud account, so it'd have to be a joint fire at my home and the 1password data center (and my phone, for that matter). Pretty bad day I feel.

Unrelated note: this was the first time I've linked to my static generated docs for this project and it was really fun watching the grafana dash of my fly.io nginx proxy pick up all the scraping traffic. Thanks for warming my cache :) I work with this tech all the time at my day job but this is the first time I've hosted something from my home, it's genuinely made my afternoon to see it light up.

Re: Password managers less secure than promised

#55

That's why KeePass is still the king. Offline vault > online vault.

One of the things the article touches on is encouraging these vendors to migrate their customers to more secure/modern security standards. How is this handled with KeePass with it being, by its very nature, decoupled?

Not the parent, but a heavy user of Keepass. When you unlock your database, you can re-key it with several options for encryption algorithm, key derivation, and the transform rounds. I also have it set up with my Yubikeys as a kinda-sorta two factor for an added layer of security.

To keep the encryption modern regular updates are made to the program, and any migration would happen when re-encrypting the database. Checking my earliest entry, I've used it for 15 years without a hiccup.

Re: Password managers less secure than promised

#56

That's why KeePass is still the king. Offline vault > online vault.

What to do if my house catches on fire, including my computer where the passwords are stored?

I sync the database to my phone, and a couple of other devices too with syncthing. I need it on my phone anyway to log into accounts while I'm out and about.

Re: Password managers less secure than promised

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What to do if my house catches on fire, including my computer where the passwords are stored?

I sync the database to my phone, and a couple of other devices too with syncthing. I need it on my phone anyway to log into accounts while I'm out and about.

What clients are you using ? Trying syncthing with synctrayzor with my windows boxes and Synctrain on my iPhone and it’s mostly alright but still a little spotty.

Re: Password managers less secure than promised

#58
post #16

> cloud-based password managers. Enough said. This kind of stuff should be offline only. If you need to access your password database on multiple devices, set up a LAN and/or a Wireguard tunnel for remote access.

At least a KeePass file via Cloud Storage seems like a somewhat sane tradeoff between security and convenience. What you're proposing where you're adding a backdoor to your home network (via Wireguard) that needs to be maintained/hardened, and then still needing a LAN hosting solution for the actual database running 24-hour, is neither convenient nor secure (least of all because of layer 1 / fire / theft). This is a…

> What you're proposing where you're adding a backdoor to your home network (via Wireguard) that needs to be maintained/hardened

I have been doing this for years, and it is both convenient and secure. No maintenance or hardening is required, as Wireguard was intentionally designed not to require any tinkering. The setup is literally one config file with the public keys of the devices allowed to access the network. I run this directly on my firewall, which happens to be an x86 PC, but you could run easily run this on a router with OpenWrt. It's hard to imagine a more secure setup than this, since you manage your own keys and no third party is involved.

Re: Password managers less secure than promised

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sync the database to my phone, and a couple of other devices too with syncthing. I need it on my phone anyway to log into accounts while I'm out and about.

What clients are you using ? Trying syncthing with synctrayzor with my windows boxes and Synctrain on my iPhone and it’s mostly alright but still a little spotty.

I'm also using Synctrayzor on my Windows 10 machine. I'm on Android using the official Syncthing app there as well as on Linux. It sometimes takes a while for them to discover each other, and it of course works better when all the devices are on my home network. The only real problem I've encountered is when filenames have special characters another OS doesn't like.
Post reply on HN