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How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

palant.info

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Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#81

Post by mattwad »

palant wrote: post #77
mizzao wrote: post #74

I've found LastPass to be increasingly buggy and less reliable as time goes on. Do they have security problems as well? Should I switch to a different service as a paying customer (for me and my family?) If so, any recommendations?

I’ve written about their security story a while ago here, not much has changed since AFAIK: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/45170/how-safe-... The trouble is that the majority of their competitors isn’t great either. I used to recommend 1Password, but another knowledgeable security researcher isn’t really fond of them.

Been using Bitwarden and it works great, at least for personal use. And Authy for 2-factor

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#82

Post by tuwtuwtuwtuw »

palant wrote: post #78
syvanen wrote: post #25

So this blog seems to completely ignores LastPass statement from 2021-12-28: > Our investigation has since found that some of these security alerts, which were sent to a limited subset of LastPass users, were likely triggered in error. As a result, we have adjusted our security alert systems and this issue has since been resolved. Source: https://blog.lastpass.com/2021/12/unusual-attempted-login-ac... Source2: https:…

I haven’t seen it when I wrote the article. However, the formulation is vague enough that it could mean anything. Maybe the alerts were sent out by mistake which would be good news. But they don’t quite say that. Their statement might also mean that they rather disabled legitimate alerts so that people don’t get concerned. So they might have “cured” the symptoms without addressing the actual issue. It certainly isn’t…

What's the difference between "triggered in error" and "sent out by mistake" then? In this context they seem like the same..

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#83

Post by imwillofficial »

willis936 wrote: post #28
syvanen wrote: post #25

So this blog seems to completely ignores LastPass statement from 2021-12-28: > Our investigation has since found that some of these security alerts, which were sent to a limited subset of LastPass users, were likely triggered in error. As a result, we have adjusted our security alert systems and this issue has since been resolved. Source: https://blog.lastpass.com/2021/12/unusual-attempted-login-ac... Source2: https:…

Which is exactly what you say when facing an existential crisis. If you have a master password leak you either: 1. lie about it and the truth never comes to light 2. lie about it and get caught and the consequences are the same as if you came clean If LP suffered a master password leak then there is no benefit to telling the truth.

Except earning trust with the customer, in a line of business that is built entirely on the customer trusting you to manage things properly.

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#84

Post by palant »

tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote: post #82
palant wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t seen it when I wrote the article. However, the formulation is vague enough that it could mean anything. Maybe the alerts were sent out by mistake which would be good news. But they don’t quite say that. Their statement might also mean that they rather disabled legitimate alerts so that people don’t get concerned. So they might have “cured” the symptoms without addressing the actual issue. It certainly isn’t…

What's the difference between "triggered in error" and "sent out by mistake" then? In this context they seem like the same..

The difference is the word “likely” which means as much as “we have no idea.”

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#85

Post by tuwtuwtuwtuw »

Ansil849 wrote: post #26
syvanen wrote: post #25

So this blog seems to completely ignores LastPass statement from 2021-12-28: > Our investigation has since found that some of these security alerts, which were sent to a limited subset of LastPass users, were likely triggered in error. As a result, we have adjusted our security alert systems and this issue has since been resolved. Source: https://blog.lastpass.com/2021/12/unusual-attempted-login-ac... Source2: https:…

LastPass's statement is extremely vague. _Why_ were these alerts triggered in error? What error triggered them?

The lack of that specific information doesn't make it vague in my view.

If I tell to that the world appears to be shaped as a globe then that statement isn't vague just because I don't explain _why_ it appears shaped as a globe.

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#86

Post by imwillofficial »

mgraczyk wrote: post #34
willis936 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is exactly what you say when facing an existential crisis. If you have a master password leak you either: 1. lie about it and the truth never comes to light 2. lie about it and get caught and the consequences are the same as if you came clean If LP suffered a master password leak then there is no benefit to telling the truth.

One advantage of telling the truth is that you don't go to prison for fraud. When evaluating this kind of conspiracy theory, it's important to consider the number of people who would have to remain silent for the conspiracy to survive, and to consider how much it would cost to keep that many people silent. In this case, it's at least a few dozen so I think it's fair to assume that such a lie would not survive very lo…

This is broken thinking built on faulty assumptions. There are countless examples of massive conspiracies and secrets never leaking.

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#87

Post by chrisfosterelli »

chowells wrote: post #64
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's little security advantage to doing this other than some obscurity, because a well informed attacker can still implement all the same attacks: * An attacker with access to the database will know they can reduce the "hashing algorithm" to two sequential hashing algorithms and still bruteforce a series of plaintext passwords to check to see if the hash matches what is in the database. * An attacker with access t…

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 implementations available to the browser within that limit that would foil what a dedicated attacker could compute in proper hardware for a dictionary attack? You'd also have to consider if it's really that expensive to just throw more hardware at a server side hash. I guess it'd depend on the browser, whether the attack is targeted, and how big the attacker's budget is that you're considering.

Either way, if this was the goal and the team considered those factors then still felt it was worth the effort of doing so I would think it seems reasonable, though it's probably not something I'd make standard practice in my own apps.

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#88

Post by ajb »

md_ wrote: post #37
_aavaa_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That statement is too squirrelly for me to trust if my passwords were stored with them. “SOME of these security alerts” “were LIKELY triggered” “HAS BEEN solved” (Emphasis mine) How can the issue be definitely solved if you aren’t sure that they were actually triggered in error, if they were in error then it’s only some of them.

It's easy for me to imagine how you get here. - Eng are still writing the postmortem - Marketing want to put out a statement - Eng know or suspect a bug exists that can trigger spurious notifications, but don't have sufficient logs to be able to reconstruct if that bug was in fact in play in production - Legal advises not to say anything definitive that they can't stand behind later I don't see any of that as particu…

No, they say "As a result, we have adjusted our security alert systems and this issue has since been resolved."

They are claiming they know what the bug was.

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#89

Post by nmca »

imwillofficial wrote: post #86
mgraczyk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One advantage of telling the truth is that you don't go to prison for fraud. When evaluating this kind of conspiracy theory, it's important to consider the number of people who would have to remain silent for the conspiracy to survive, and to consider how much it would cost to keep that many people silent. In this case, it's at least a few dozen so I think it's fair to assume that such a lie would not survive very lo…

This is broken thinking built on faulty assumptions. There are countless examples of massive conspiracies and secrets never leaking.

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

Re: How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

#90

Post by dreae »

imwillofficial wrote: post #86
mgraczyk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One advantage of telling the truth is that you don't go to prison for fraud. When evaluating this kind of conspiracy theory, it's important to consider the number of people who would have to remain silent for the conspiracy to survive, and to consider how much it would cost to keep that many people silent. In this case, it's at least a few dozen so I think it's fair to assume that such a lie would not survive very lo…

This is broken thinking built on faulty assumptions. There are countless examples of massive conspiracies and secrets never leaking.

Then how do we have the examples?
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