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Comment by SkyMarshal | Hacker News Reader

I don’t trust or use SAAS password managers. They are massive honeypots just waiting to be pwned and everyones’ passwords to all their websites stolen. They have above average security, but unlike a typical website they can’t just store a one-way hash of passwords that remains secure even when stolen, they have to store the actual password.

I imagine nation state-supported malicious hackers are targeting them. Everything else is getting breached and leaked these days, there’s a non-trivial possibility these will too.

I just use KeePassXC instead, and periodically ‘sync’ the database across my workstations and laptop. And by ‘sync’, I mean manually export the database and rsync it around to my workstations and laptop and re-import it on each. But given how infrequently I create new web accounts, this isn’t a major hassle. It works fine, I don’t need some centralized service for this.

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> they can’t just store a one-way hash of passwords that remains secure even when stolen, they have to store the actual password

Maybe I'm missing something but sure they can't store its hash but they can and do store the password strongly encrypted. Presumably without the master password, at least, it should be close to impossible to retrieve the passwords. Or is that assumption wrong?

That's exactly what they do and they have the audits[0][1] to prove it.

[0] https://support.1password.com/security-assessments/ [1] https://bitwarden.com/images/resources/Bitwarden-Security-As...

That is correct and they apparently have the audits to prove it.

That said, it's not bulletproof. The chink in the armor is the browser extensions they all use. All it would take is somebody to slip some trojan code into one of the browser extensions and all of the sudden you have a few hundred million decrypted password databases which could trivially be uploaded to wherever.

Could you not argue the same thing for almost any code used by almost any piece of software closer to the metal?

e.g. someone manages to slip malicious code into Chrome/Chromium which eventually makes its way out to every Electron app/most browsers, or something gets injected into Windows/macOS/Linux, etc.

On one hand, yes software supply chain vulns are getting difficult to maintain conceptually total coverage of while also maintaining a pleasant environment for developers to productive in.

On the other hand, yes there eventually is a trust point somewhere. A spiral of upstream what-ifs isn't productive IMO, I agree.

>Could you not argue the same thing for almost any code used by almost any piece of software closer to the metal?

You could. But if you haven't trusted all/most of your passwords to any single app, you wont have a problem with them being exposed when that particular piece of software is compromised.

Even if someone compromises your OS itself, you'll only lose the passwords you typed in while you were using it compromised. And that's if it does captures thoses, and if it sends them to some remote endpoint, and if it's not caught soon, and so on.

With a password manager compromised, on the other hand, you could loose anything you've put it in, all at once.

The likelihood of malicious code making its way into a browser extension in production is way, WAY higher than it is for something like Chrome or Windows.

For what it's worth, 1Password has a longstanding $100k bounty for capturing a flag inside a publicly available encrypted vault.

https://bugcrowd.com/agilebits

I suspect that’s not nearly enough, given that their breached database would probably sell for multiple orders of magnitude more on the darknet. Should probably be $1M at least.

1Password vaults are encrypted end-to-end, their database would not be worth nearly that much. It's a bunch of worthless data. A successful hack of 1Password would probably require pushing bad client updates.

Besides which bug bounties are not really intended to disincentivize people from committing crimes, they're intended to incentivize researchers to report findings and reward them for their efforts.

Parent comment is right about the value of a successful vault exploit. Given the number of people and companies using 1Password now, $100k would likely pale in comparison to an exploit's value on the black market.

>1Password vaults are encrypted end-to-end, their database would not be worth nearly that much. It's a bunch of worthless data.

Doesn't matter for our case, since it already assumes the database potentially compromisable. The parent's comment concerned whether the "bounty for capturing a flag inside a publicly available encrypted vault" is enough. So the question is not whether the bounty is enough given it's impossible to win, but whether it's enough given it might be possible to win.

In other words, whether someone who finds an exploit to decrypt the vaults contents would get a better value by (a) revealing it to 1Password company and taking the $100K bounty, or (b) selling the exploit to people who would give millions to be able to decrypt other's vaults...

The value of such an exploit likely exceeds their valuation.

I think you misunderstand how 1password vaults works.

That is terribly low for such a critical issue. There are Ethereum L2s that pay out $2M bounties.

https://twitter.com/saurik/status/1491821215924690950

That's a bad analogy, although you point out a possibly good thing for L2/crypto - the bug bounties are massive because the projects have a silly amount of funds.

Password managers don't operate with those economic models though.

1Password has raised almost $1B. Surely they could put at least $1M toward a critical bounty?

Depends on the cost/benefit. 3x security engineers to detect/respond vulns and attacks is less expensive but gets similar coverage plus a lot of other work capacity, for instance.

1M allocated to this bug bounty is 1M not spent if their security is strong enough.

What cost? There is literally zero cost.

Unless a successful attack actually occurs, in which case it's literally almost priceless in terms of their reputational damage, unless they can get their hands on it before someone else.

Although PWMs would get a reputation hit from a breach, there isn't any precedent yet for a high-trust software being breached publicly and what happens to their reputation.

But, if you ask around enough with security teams at the large cloud providers, there are definitely rumors of APT-level activity being detected/blocked at the infra level. Yet, cloud is still the most secure option out there vs. on-prem in 90% of the use cases for it so to speak. Similarly, there is just too much precedent of high trust firms being breached, and nothing really happening to them as a result (fines, loss of users, etc).

So, you allocate $1mil, possibly spend it, and either way can't use it for anything else, or you allocate a fixed cost of $600k/yr and get a lot more out of it on the security front, to include solid defense-in-depth, detections, and IR capabilities for if/when the successful PWM attack finally occurs. Personally, yes probably worth putting out a hefty bounty, but pragmatically you'd get more out of hiring the engineers.

Agreed!

In fact, I'd argue that, if they are positing that the reputational risk for a successful hack exceeds 10% of their notional valuation, then they should try to commit at least 10% of their market cap as insurance against that ever happening, or at least if they would gain enough information to prevent this from ever occurring. This isn't that hard to figure out.

The best thing about that insurance is that it's literally free -- they never have to pay out unless the event actually occurs.

Yes.

Given that the payout is probabalistic and serves business goodwill, I'd argue for a more substantial reward. Possibly secured through a bond or insurance policy.

Password managers unlock hot wallets, and much more besides.

The vault vendor likely isn't exposed to that full liability. But in a business-trust basis, the goodwill is all but certainly worth > $100k.

> They have above average security, but unlike a typical website they can’t just store a one-way hash of passwords that remains secure even when stolen, they have to store the actual password

No, they don’t store directly the actual password, they store it encrypted by a encryption key derived from your master password. A leak of the database won’t reveal any password, as long as your master password stays secure (aka is not "hunter3")

> as long as your master password stays secure (aka is not "hunter3")

You mean, the master password that many people reuse across sites and has been leaked into the darknet by breaches of other sites? Or if not leaked directly, at least some entropy about it probably has been.

I know these services don’t store the password in plain text, but it’s still stored in reversible format. That’s a juicy target.

Do you understand the concept of a password manager?

You only have to remember one password, and for that reason people can choose a longer and more complex one.

Then your passwords are encrypted using that master password.

So people cannot “reverse” your password if you pick a reasonably long master password.

For reference, my master password is a 27 character sentence which would take somewhere between a millennium and the heat death of the universe to crack. It encrypts around 500 passwords, each in itself 25-35 character long pass phrases I do not know.

This kind of dependence sometimes scares me to be honest, not that password dependent services have left much choice to us.

I store the printed credentials to my password manager and my e-mail account in a safe deposit box (without mentioning on that paper what the codes are for).

Then I store a YubiKey which is a second factor to these accounts in another safe deposit box in another location.

So should I forget my master password: drive to box 1.

Should my house with all my computers burn down: drive to boxes 1 and 2, find a pc or phone somewhere, and I have access to all my accounts.

Should my password manager go bankrupt overnight and take my vault with them: drive to boxes 1 and 2, then click “forgot my password” on all services and use my e-mail to recover access.

Should my password manager go bankrupt overnight and take my vault with them, my e-mail provider go bankrupt overnight and take my mailbox with them: at least I have my own e-mail domain, so I can set up a new mailbox elsewhere

Should my password manager go bankrupt overnight and take my vault with them, my e-mail provider go bankrupt overnight and take my mailbox with them, and my domain registrar go bankrupt overnight and take my domain with them: yeah…then I’m screwed. I’ll migrate to a wooded country and become a hermit.

Could you help me understand, that if you are this considerate and comprehensive about your risk factors and prepared at all sorts of possibilities, why still use a password manager solution that can "go bankrupt overnight and take my vault with them"? Why not just use KeePass and manage the vault yourself? If your answer is "I only need to do these safe box things once", then writing your own scripts to sync KeePass database between your devices is also only needed done once, right? Even if it's more hassles, considering you will never have the last 3 bullets listed, isn't that worth the trouble?

Because I think my password manager is far more competent in keeping my safe available “in the cloud” than I am in keeping my safe available.

But the password to your domain was in the password manager.

You can check this fairly easily with https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords. It's not exhaustive obviously but it's something.

1Password vaults are also encrypted with a separate secret key that is generated locally and never stored. So you'd need the password and the secret key to decrypt.

What sources do you have that indicate master pws in the pw manager context are getting leaked or reused?

you don't really need a 'source' for that do you? - it's common knowledge that people reuse passwords across sites. It's not best practice for sure, but plenty of people do it. If some low quality site leaks your email and password and if you were dumb enough to use that as your master password for your password manage, you are at more risk than if the bad actor didn't have that information.

But that's exactly why you use a password manager; so it can generate passwords for you, while you only need to remember one password to unlock it.

You should probably think a little more critically about password managers.

You don't reuse passwords at all. That is expressly the point of password managers. You generate a new password that is completely random and quite long for each independent website.

If one of the sites is breached, no matter. Damage is contained to that site. The only password of yours that is leaked for that site. The only place that password can be used is - you guessed it - that site.

A master password is the only pw in a PWM at real risk of reuse.

However, without placing too much unwarranted trust in the user, consider the following:

- extensive warnings during user onboarding about how to approach setting and safe keeping of the master password, especially around reuse.... ok, but some users are still hopeless with this, what then

- taking Lastpass for instance, lock-out features for logging into the extension if you're coming out of a new geo-ip (proactive risk control)

- taking LP again, alerting to the user for successful logins to the platform from new geo-ips (reactive risk control).

- all the on-device security controls required to get into a PWM: touch/face-id logins for the apps, an official browser extension, on and on. I'd also imagine LP security is watching HIBP very closely.

Put all that together, odds are you or the PWM security teams are able to filter pretty well for password reuse for master passwords. So yes I'd expect sources/stats to be out there, or at least counterpoints to the above which when put together map a decent defense-in-depth for PWMs which isn't present in most or almost any browser extensions, to include Tier 1 cryptocurrency browser extensions which are responsible for significant more funds and still maintain good security (think: Metamask).

Even if your Master Password is “hunter3”, 1Password, as an example, will mix in a locally generated Secret Key to increase the entropy [1]

[1]: https://blog.1password.com/what-the-secret-key-does/

For that reason I trust 1Password in the non-SAAS version. The password vault is stored locally and then snchronized between devices via iCloud. So there is no single point. First there needs to be an exploit for iCloud and second to the 1Password vault. The benefit of this is, the vault is a simple website by itself that can be loaded into any webbrowser without the app.

Oh that’s cool, didn’t realize 1pw had a self-hosted version, will check it out.

Unfortunately, the self-hosted option is only available in version 7. Version 8 is the current version and does not offer self hosting. 1Password has said they will not offer it in future versions either, so it’s not worth getting set up if self hosting is critical to you.

Same here. KeePassXC, sync manually and backup it manually. I don't trust SaaS as well.

I add on KeepassXC, synched to one of my cloud storage in the background with a decently misleading name and in a misleading folder.

So…security by obscurity.

Nothing wrong with security through obscurity as an extra layer on top of encryption.

Fair point. In the end, all these security measures that we’re using are really just a form of “security through obscurity,” isn’t it. ;-)

You could use Syncthing so you don't have to manually sync and backup nor trust any SaaS

I do the same thing but worry about a nation state or rich enough hackers to just take over the project and add nefarious code. I’ll never audit the code and make sure it produces the binary I get from the Apple store. So I’ve started adding my own “salt” - I type an extra character or two (same for all passwords) to the end of every password I enter. It’s the easiest way to protect against not being able to trust my local password app that I can think off.

If the hacker can decrypt your whole password safe and view all your plaintext passwords, I think they'll work out your scheme.

Unless the hacker mass decrypts a couple million passwords, in which case one person's passwords that don't work for the login bot probably won't catch the hacker's attention.

I don’t understand how. If I record that my password for Google is xyzzy, but in reality it’s xyzzy123, and 123 is part of every password but not recorded anywhere (other than my mind), how would they work that out? They’d just see that none of my passwords worked. If there is a weakness to this system please let me know.

Not sure if this helps or hurts, but the places they're most likely to see a problem are in the clients and automatic browser plugin updates. An attacker doesn't even need to target a password manager directly; they can collect passwords pretty well with any compromised plugin, just not all of the passwords at once.

Password managers just move the the problem somewhere else IMO. Saving passwords with your browser is even worse.

Passwords should not be rotated unless they have been comphremised. Password rotation is the problem, not your password.

Use different teirs of passwords. Have a single password u use for anything that is non-senstive, and then go custom on anything that is. Only login to those sensitive services from 1 devices, forgo your convience. These custom passwords should be very rarely be used and u can come up with some custom way to store / remmeber them. Atleast then i have to spend hours and hours and hours on your box, looking, instead of minutes.

for the N number of websites that force me to create accounts, I use an auto-generated password from the password manager and save to the same SaaS password manager. These are for websites I don't care if the passwords get leaked, I can live with the damage. Some have access to credit cards, but meh.

For the old-school (am I young?) websites like mail, fb, bank accounts, etc I remember the passwords.

Seems like a workable compromise for now. Tho I am scared I will start getting lazy and start storing sensitive websites in pwd managers.

I’m in the boat as well, I don’t quite trust SaaS managers and ultimately settled on KeePassXC. I also host my own mailinabox though, so my database is synced on my personal Nextcloud across my devices.

In addition to a master passphrase, I also use a keyfile for keypass, so even if the database is compromised I would hope that it’s still not useful without the keyfile.

If your threat model truly think it worth the hassle for you to use KeePass offline and sync offline. Then so be it.

However, given KeePass is still a piece of software, nothing stop state-supported malicious hackers injecting vulnerability into it, and suck your password away into their database.

Have you consider making sure all your computers are offline when using KeePass?

Just don't update your password manager. If it's fully offline (and it's a mature product), there's a pretty low chance there'll be an update that you'll actually need.

As time goes on without reported backdoors, the chance that your passwords are safe just gets better.

I am the same, but with the enhancement of using Resilio Sync to automatically sync the file between devices.

I do the same, with Nextcloud though, but I doubt SkyMarshal would consider that as an enhancement. He, and others, sync it manually and "offline" for security reasons.

You can use any kind of sync software you prefer, be it cloud-based or local LAN-only. At least with cloud-based it’s not a glaringly visible honeypot with a huge target painted on it.

Setting up local automated sync is on my todo list, it’s just lower priority than too many other things. As I mentioned, I don’t create new accounts so often that I need automated sync.

Mobile devices?

On Android you can use Keepass2Android[0] to open your KeePass files. You still have to copy your kdbx file to your phone somehow, of course.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=keepass2androi...

Resilio Sync + Keepass2Android or Keepass Touch (iOS)

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