Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

palant.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 94 posts

Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#81

Post by Too »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #69
Too wrote: post #65

Related interesting read: Why pidgin doesn't store passwords encrypted https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords I guess the moral of both stories are, if you want your passwords really encrypted, lock your OS user account and use full drive encryption.

And never run any programs that you don't trust with all of your passwords? That doesn't seem realistic.

Android and iOS provide sandboxes for applications so you can install less trustworthy apps with smaller risk. Desktop OS's should really catch up here. Maybe not to the extreme level as iOS where there isn't even a concept of file system but at least provide a separate safe storage location for each application.

Every application shouldn't have to reinvent encryption of its storage just so other apps can't read the data.

Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#82

Post by kerkeslager »

bradknowles wrote: post #50
kerkeslager wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least Firefox is open source and probably doesn't broadcast your passwords back to the server. 1Password is closed source and stores your passwords on a server which, should it ever be hacked, could easily cause all sorts of issues. If they received a secret order to compromise your accounts Lavabit-style, they wouldn't even have to be hacked--they might willingly backdoor their own product. I use KeePass or KeePa…

Sorry, you’ve got some things wrong about 1Password. Yes, they provide a cloud option where you can store your passwords on their server for synchronization purposes. But you don’t have to use it. You could just not use synchronization at all, or use a file stored on Dropbox, or iCloud, or other cloud provider of your choice. And if you use only a local file, you can still choose to sync that over the local network w…

> The 1Password authors have been pretty open about how distributed their team is, and how no one single government would be able to convince them to do those kinds of things — the other developers would find out and then the game would be over.

Your options are:

A. Go to jail for contempt of court, which is a crime for which you receive no due process or appeals.

B. Give the control over to the government. Yes, your coworkers will find out about it, but you can always get another job.

Are you actually confident that all of the 1Password devs would choose A? Only one of them has to choose B.

I admire Ladar Levison for shutting down Lavabit rather than running a compromised business, because his bravery is the exception, not the rule. There are far more companies out there who have simply handed over the keys to the government when placed under minor duress, and I'm not sure on what basis you're assuming 1Password is going to be one of the exceptions.

> They are also open about the crypto algorithms they use.

Look, I'm sure the 1Password guys are nice, upstanding people, but implementing crypto correctly is hard, really hard. Sure, they are probably telling the truth about what algorithms they use. But did they implement them correctly? Would they tell you if they hadn't, given it would hurt their business?

> As for KeePass or KeePassX, which version do you use? Which of the dozens and dozens of different implementations do you use? Which database format do they support? Do you build the binaries yourself with trusted compilers? Where do you get those trusted compilers and how can you be sure that they haven’t been compromised?

Obviously security is relative, and you can point out ways in which my process is insecure. Indeed, you missed some (my computer could have a virus that keylogs my passwords--my password DB is on two drives which I connect via USB). But literally all of these apply to 1Password as well, so I don't think any of this proves that KeePass is just as insecure as 1Password.

And very notably, these are all security tradeoffs. I get something for every decrease in security I've accepted. The only thing you get for storing your passwords on someone else's computer is that they store them for you and let you access them from multiple devices, which is not something I want or need. I'm not sure you get anything at all in exchange for your password manager being closed-source--that's entirely for 1Password's benefit, not yours.

Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#83

Post by eridius »

acdha wrote: post #80
eridius wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ticket is marked as resolved and the last update is 16 years ago. Also this is the first I've heard that iCloud keychain sync only syncs keychain items created from App Store applications, and color me quite skeptical on that. Apple previously restricted the iCloud file and Key-Value Store functionality to App Store apps, but for keychain syncing it's just a single flag given to the item when creating it. Also I…

Ack, sorry: that link should have been https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106400 – I was hastily searching bugzilla on a phone. The iCloud issue is discussed towards the bottom and references the Chrome ticket to remove support: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=466638

Thanks.

It sounds like the real problem here is the fact that iCloud keychain doesn't have an access control list so apps can only access items within their same App Group, which means Firefox can't see Safari passwords and, if Firefox switches to iCloud keychain, no other browser can read passwords from Firefox. Though honestly this doesn't sound like a big deal to me (especially since the "Firefox can't see Safari passwords" is already the situation).

The Chrome bug does claim that Mac apps could not use the keychain access groups entitlement without being in the App Store but I can't find any hint of that being true today. I believe Apple relaxed the iCloud restrictions at some point so it's possible that this used to be true and isn't anymore.

Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#84

Post by orev »

The article completely misses the threat model, or the comparison on the threat models. FOR REGULAR USERS, the choice is to either have an easy to remember/guess/same password on every Internet-exposed site, OR to use the password saver with a potentially easy to guess local password while using longer/harder/different passwords on each site. The second model is far stronger than the first, as one now has at least some protection from the enitre Internet and unscrupulous web site operators. A local compromise is bad of course, but that affects both models equally as either the password database is stolen, a keylogger is installed, or any of the number of other issues that arise from gaining local access to a system.

Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#85

Post by palant »

orev wrote: post #84

The article completely misses the threat model, or the comparison on the threat models. FOR REGULAR USERS, the choice is to either have an easy to remember/guess/same password on every Internet-exposed site, OR to use the password saver with a potentially easy to guess local password while using longer/harder/different passwords on each site. The second model is far stronger than the first, as one now has at least so…

No, I didn't miss the threat model. I am all for password managers, in fact I am even developing one myself. The sad truth is however, most password managers aren't exactly a shining example of security best practices. This blog post is simply me being disappointed seeing Mozilla do so poorly. As things are now, the master password on the Firefox password manager (a common recommendation meant to improve security) is little more than security theater. But I'm not saying of course that no password manager whatsoever is a better solution.

Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#86

Post by palant »

pzxc wrote: post #47
vortico wrote: post #39

The author admitted the stronger-than-needed title in the first comment, but I'd like to make it clear when talking about practical personal security: There are ~100,000 people in the world that would think to run a GPU password cracker on your Firefox master password hash, if they had access and wanted to snoop. There are ~1,000,000,000 people that would think to open your browser and go to a website you use to try…

The alternative is not to give up on password management completely, but to use a proper password manager like KeePass.

I am all for using a better password manager. In fact, with PfP: Pain-free Passwords I developed one myself - and I invested much thought into making sure the master password cannot realistically be guessed unless it is absolutely trivial. However, most people will go with whatever is built in. So no excuses for browser makers to offer something that has been known to be very suboptimal for at least nine years.

Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#87

Post by palant »

vortico wrote: post #39

The author admitted the stronger-than-needed title in the first comment, but I'd like to make it clear when talking about practical personal security: There are ~100,000 people in the world that would think to run a GPU password cracker on your Firefox master password hash, if they had access and wanted to snoop. There are ~1,000,000,000 people that would think to open your browser and go to a website you use to try…

Well, the software to crack Firefox master passwords is there for anybody to download. Maybe not quite as well optimized as hashcat with a GPU but it's easy enough to use that plenty of people might decide to try it out.

Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#88

Post by palant »

delroth wrote: post #4
yborg wrote: post #2

Fixing issues like this is clearly less important than implementing browser-side VR support, I don't see what Palant is on about. As a Firefox user, trading the security of any and all accounts I store passwords for in the browser is something I'd gladly exchange for ... anyway, VR is cool, right? Guess I should dump the password store and go all-in on the 1Password extension.

What attack vector would be mitigated by switching to a stronger hashing scheme for this specific use case? And are there other mitigations that exist for this attack vector that would be more appropriate? To me is seems that this feature of browsers is really only meant as a protection against non-advanced attackers accessing an unlocked computer. For this scenario, having a stronger hash would do nothing. Having a…

Yes, it is stupid to leave your computer unlocked but it happens all the time in every workplace. If spending a minute pulling two files from an unlocked system is all it takes to get access to all of person's passwords - that's scary. And this would be trivial to mitigate, NSS already has everything necessary.

Note that full disk encryption offers exactly no protection if you forgot to lock your computer. Not that full disk encryption is common, almost nobody does that.

Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#89

Post by palant »

kuschku wrote: post #27
gweinberg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be true if the password were 16 random ascii characters. But of course it's not. It's almost certainly only using printable characters, and probably has something a lot like words in it.

That’s why I, in the EDIT, then chose to assume 2^5 different characters, which is roughly lowercase ascii plus some special characters. That’d still be 80 bits, and still secure enough.

An 80 bit password would be secure. In fact, now that I am aware of this issue I generate the master password for Thunderbird with PfP: Pain-free Passwords and it's in fact around 80 bits strong (too bad that I cannot use PfP in Thunderbird directly). But if you as a human choose a 16 characters password you will get far less than 80 bits. Passwords chosen by humans follow known patterns, use dictionary words etc. Which is why password cracking applications won't stupidly test the entire password space - they will go for passwords that humans are more likely to choose. Fact is, for a human getting significantly higher than 40 bits while still being able to remember the password is very hard.

Re: Master password in Firefox or Thunderbird? Do not bother

#90

Post by acdha »

eridius wrote: post #83
acdha wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ack, sorry: that link should have been https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106400 – I was hastily searching bugzilla on a phone. The iCloud issue is discussed towards the bottom and references the Chrome ticket to remove support: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=466638

Thanks. It sounds like the real problem here is the fact that iCloud keychain doesn't have an access control list so apps can only access items within their same App Group, which means Firefox can't see Safari passwords and, if Firefox switches to iCloud keychain, no other browser can read passwords from Firefox. Though honestly this doesn't sound like a big deal to me (especially since the "Firefox can't see Safari…

It mostly annoys me that we had at least 17 years where this relatively modest amount of code would have made a big security & usability benefit. Even if Apple eventually deprecated it, that’s a longer useful lifespan than an awful lot of code has.
Post reply on HN