That's a general theme I see with all this SSO stuff. You have a few companies with root on the universe. Am I weird that this concerns me?
That's a general theme I see with all this SSO stuff. You have a few companies with root on the universe. Am I weird that this concerns me?
Unless their local client was compromised (not impossible - but if your local is compromised you're in trouble regardless), even if someone hacked them and stole their data, they would not have your clear-text info.
It's everyone's choice to make but I am personally OK with this security/convenience trade-off.. It's "good enough" for me - mostly because I trust them to know how to do this better than I could - if it means I can manage all my passwords in one place and access them from any device.
1Password also has useful (to me) quality-of-life features like integration with HaveIBeenPwned, it can also show you re-used passwords, and if you store credit cards or other info, it will also tell you when they're about to expire etc..
Plus you can store any arbitrary metadata with any record, so I even use it to store non-sensitive, but still private, info associated with logins, docs, ID, etc..
If the NSA asked for escrow or root everywhere people would freak out, yet central SSO mostly accomplishes the same thing and people are running toward it because convenience. Of course the same is true for surveillance. Private adtech does things with surveillance that would give people a heart attack if the NSA did it, and unlike the NSA they don't even pretend to be accountable to anyone we can elect.
(It's the same because governments can compel corporations under their jurisdiction and there isn't a ton a company can do about it.)
While some may find this debatable, I happen to think we just had a rather incompetent but still very concerning fascist coup attempt in the USA. Historically civilizations lose their collective minds periodically. Given that computing infrastructure is becoming the basis for virtually all communication and much of life, is it wise to centralize access control like this?
I feel like younger people of virtually all political stripes are just blithely unconcerned with this and assume "it can't happen here" or "that's something that happened back in the early 20th century but not anymore, we have totally solved stable government." I think that's incredibly naive.
It’s not ‘all my passwords stored in their database unencrypted’ easy to compromise, but it’s also not protection against a motivated agency with jurisdiction said service has to respect, and it’s also not solid protection against any state level actor if they really care/want to spend resources targeting someone.
That said, it’s all about threat assessment and trade offs. Especially for a business, what are the consequences if the NSA does x, or China does y?
For 99% of businesses? Nothing except some irritation if you find out. Same as with most things.
If someone is an activist going after those agencies/gov’ts? Probably quite severe consequences.
If I remember correctly, some of the fallout from the Chinese gov’t hacking Gmail was folks being ‘disappeared’, extended families being held hostage in China, etc.
For now. What happens when they eat enough of the market and displace enough other tools that the government says "Ok, now MitM the encryption." All they would need to do is push an update and re-encrypt the first time you unlock it. Now, this has always been true, but it's not on your servers and source repos yet, right now it's sandboxed.
How about internet outages? Service outages? Sure, local cache, but that cache expires.
I love PW managers, even cloud ones, but I wouldn't tie on directly to my local login and auth infrastructure to the exclusion of other local options.
I have autofill turned off because it can fill into nefarious forms if you're not careful. And I copy and paste from my pw manager into my terminal when required, because again I don't want it automatically being helpful when I want to be careful.
I hope no other apps are watching your clipboard.
I'll take that risk, given probability over possibility. But thank you for pointing out at least one scenario I hadn't thought of!
> How about internet outages? Service outages? Sure, local cache, but that cache expires.
Local cache doesn't expire, also the probability of me being offline for so long that this becomes a problem is close enough to zero for my comfort.
That said, I am guessing you might be responsible for some kind of critical (even just to you) infrastructure so we probably have different variables in our "is this for me" math..
One nice feature that 1pass has is that it will warn you when you attempt to autofill credentials for a url or mobile application that isn't listed as part of the credential.
e.g. 1pass "Logins" have a URI associated with them like "google.com" and if you visit a phishing site like "g00gle.com" and hit autofill 1pass says something along the lines of "Are you sure you want to fill these creds into g00gle.com?" and not fill until you approve. It's not foolproof, but certainly provides a nice barrier against fake login/phishing sites.