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How does this address the point of the article? Which is that you should use the browser's builtin password manager and not a third party manager that injects user scripts into all websites and break the sandbox model?

The point is that while yes, many 3rd party password managers have issues, the overwhelming majority of attacks are not against password managers but against reused passwords - so honestly either the 1st or 3rd party choice is a win over using neither.

Ok so:

1) not use any manager => bad

2) use a 3rd party => pretty crap as the article says

3) use a built-in => great

Why would you ever use 2? This is almost as bad as Bitcoin, which not only solves nothing but also destroys a ton of energy.

I have never used a manager except for the builtins. And I would have never expected them (prior to reading this article) to be such utterly junk solutions to just inject additional code into the website itself. I thought there's a dedicated browser API or something.

3rd party password managers have a bunch of useful features, which is why I use one. Here are the first few that come to mind:

- portability, if I use chrome on my desktop, firefox at work, and safari on mobile I'm out of luck.

- built-in password managers only work for websites - I store many non-website security credentials in my password manager

- extra details - I often add the security questions for a site into my password manager

- compromised password warnings (maybe some of the built in password systems do this now?)

2, 3, 4 are handled by Chrome, for example. These really are trivial features that any decent corpo can get right.

1 obviously isn't.

Oh, yes, I forgot a pretty important one, I don't want to upload all my passwords to google. Offline storage, and direct device-to-device syncing.

Last I checked I couldn’t export Chrome passwords (aka offline backup), couldn’t add non site passwords, and couldn’t manage non site based passwords/secrets with chrome password manager. And that was a month ago?

You can import chrome passwords from other browsers so I think you can also export them for backup.

I agree that I don't think you can add custom secrets.

Sure enough, looks like I was wrong re: export. Thanks! Unfortunately other things are still an issue - https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95606

> - built-in password managers only work for websites - I store many non-website security credentials in my password manager

The one integrated with Firefox supports integration with an Android stored password entry tool. As a manager it's of very poor quality - better to do all your actual management from desktop Firefox - but as a tool to enter a stored password into an app, or to save the password you just entered, it works quite nicely.

> - compromised password warnings (maybe some of the built in password systems do this now?)

Firefox does have that service

That's only because there are more people who reuse passwords than people who use online password managers. As they're becoming popular, more cybercriminals are going to exploit it.

But also there will also be more attention directed toward these low-hanging vulnerabilities, so perhaps password manager vendors will adapt too.

There are already enough people using password managers that they’re a target.

If they were as easy targets as you imply, then they’d already be exploited.

The fact they’re not demonstrates that’s reused passwords is lower hanging fruit.

Attacking password managers is still a scalability problem, there would be always better targets out there to gain access to credentials.

Sure if you are in a position that your threat model includes actual targeted attacks then you need to reconsider things. But then software password managers might not be the way to go regardless.

A lot of security advice needs to be taken in the context it was given - that context is always a specific threat model(s).

Writing down passwords in an office is a terrible idea, keeping a small book with passwords in a drawer in your study is quite fine for most people.

Security is always a trade off between different threat models, anything you do reduces the likelihood of ones and increase the likelihood of others.

Encrypting the laptop reduces the chance of some random person extracting data if the device is lost or stolen, also to some extent reduces the chances of it being successfully searched by law enforcement. It does however increases the chances of a threat agent torturing you or your loved ones for access.

Now this isn’t an argument to not use device encryption, unless ofc the threat of violence is actually real at that point neither option might actually be viable and you would look for other means to store and transport data other than an encrypted device.

If you are on Safari, your browsers' builtin password manager is unfortunately Keychain and you cannot easily export your passwords out of keychain.

Additionally, if you use two different browsers or operating systems you'll need a 3rd party tool to keep your passwords in sync.

For me, that's why I use a 3rd party.

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Funny thing is though, I consider myself the 1st party. The website or app I am using is the 2nd party. Anyone else including the browser is a 3rd party. Neither Google, nor Apple, nor Mozilla, to name a few of the top browser-makers, are anything more than middlemen.

I think it's better to trust them with less rather than allow them to keep the passwords as well since they have no incentive to make them portable between competing browsers.

This is addressed in the article:

>Second, everyone needs to be using unique passwords. You don’t have to use a password manager to do that, whatever system works for you is fine. If you want to use a notebook in a desk drawer, that’s totally acceptable.

Yeah, idiot web programmers that don't encrypt PWs and use salting.

Use a PW manager. If you really don't want to use one, don't use the same PW. At least at your own salt.

eg. HN@thepwialwaysuse4

HN would be the "salt" for Hackernews.

But if that salted pw gets exposed, can a hacker just guess your pws for other sites?

E.g. myBank@thepwialwaysuse

Yes, but you're not important enough for someone to try your password on other sites by hand, and bots are hopefully not smart enough to do this automatically.

You should still use a password manager. Or at least a paper notebook.

Do bots need to do this automatically? What if a programmer gets that database and does a quick search for those naive salts? Then he can do some pattern matching and try the same pattern in some sites like PayPal, Apple, Gmail, etc. Generalize it a bit and you can even create a tool to do this for you for every new database leaked.

He would have to break the cryptographic algo to see the salt. Good luck with that. Sure that is possible for the NSA with weak encryption. But most hackers wont be able to do this. The salt does not give a slightly different hash but a totally different hash. Also, using salt (your own or server based) should protect you from some kind of rainbow table attacks.

But just use a PW manager (e.g. enpass.io ) I am very happy with it but I don't use the autofill plug-ins. You can never be paranoid enough.

I think the OP is talking about salts that get concatenated as a prefix or suffix, not the salting that happens in oneway hash functions. Remember the topic here is related to getting your pw's exposed and how to easily create different pw's to deal with that scenario.

Both. The salting SHOULD happen in one way Hash functions. But sometimes it does not. Using your own prefix when always using the same password is the second worst solution but at least better than nothing. Poor mans salting :-)

Use a PW manager.

I use a PW manager like its a religion. But having all my eggs in one basket gets me so nervous. I like the poor man's salting solution, and used it a lot before i got a PW manager. I just like to use a scheme where if you see my PW you cannot make out what the pw will be for some other site. For example if the site is hackernews.com, the pw might be "ag" + myusualpassword. Where "ag" is the first two letters of the base64 string of the URL... in this case "hackernews.com". That was just an example... I will not divulge what I actually used to generate my poor man's salt.

> Then he can do some pattern matching and try the same pattern in some sites like PayPal, Apple, Gmail, etc. Generalize it a bit and you can even create a tool to do this for you for every new database leaked.

It's the bikelock principle. A bikelock is rarely going to be strong enough to secure your bike. It doesn't have to. It just needs to be secure enough that the thief will nick the next bike. Putting pnt12:HackerNews53cureP4ssw0rd and pnt12@gmail.com:HackerNews53cureP4ssw0rd into every service is going to be profitable enough that they don't necessarily have to try the next step.

But in general you're right: don't use these. Reused passwords aren't secure. Use keys generated by so-called password managers.