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Comment by mtlynch | Hacker News Reader

I didn't find it so scary due to the fact that it requires the attacker to read process memory. But then they pointed out that if the process memory gets paged to disk, then an attacker can recover the password from disk, which is admittedly scarier.

Still, it does require the attacker to either have root on your machine or physical access to your disk. If the attacker has root on your machine, it's game over anyway. You can mitigate the threat of recovering the password from your disk by using disk encryption.

Even when I hear about KeePass vulnerabilities, they're always substantially less severe than the attacks we see on LastPass and other web-hosted password managers where an attacker can exfiltrate bulk credentials at once by compromising a server.

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This is hardly scary at all to me because if you're on my machine it's most likely game over. If you can read process memory you can just sit there until I use an interesting password copied into the clipboard.

This is also the reason you always use full disk encryption: because you don't know what sensitive content might get sprayed into your files.

If you are copying your passwords into the clipboard, you've already failed at using a password manager. Might as well just use an unencrypted text file.

Depends on the threat. If you may have a keylogger than copying may bypass that. KeePass 2 can even spilt its auto typing between the keyboard and clipboard so neither has the whole secret.

I tried to do something more structured by enabling auto-typing or something (in KeepassX (not XC)). First thing I wound up doing was to auto-type the password into the next application, which was a chat program.

How about Taking a computer to a repair shop. The staff will have access to your computer and passwords

You are simply explaining why you don't give people your disk encryption password. It's a lot of access, and just about impossible to be sure there's not substantial valuable content in free space or swap on disk.

I’m saying if passwords are available to someone with physical access to a person’s computer, there are many situations when that physical access is had without the owner realizing their passwords are at risk

Openbsd encrypts it's swap by default, you can jump through a couple of hoops and encrypt your swap on linux. on windows, i don't know, however, if you have an encrypted disk your pagefile(if on that encrypted disk) will also be encrypted.

On Windows the swap FILE is encrypted if the partition is stored into is encrypted.

Same with the hibernation file, Bitlocker will require your password again (if it has one) on resume.

I went on a sort of deep dive of how swap partitions are encrypted. Most of the time the crypto block device is tied into the swap system, which makes a lot of sense, reusing layers and all that, That is how linux and freebsd do it. but openbsd is interesting. it uses 512KB blocks each with it's own encryption key, and once all references to a block are gone the key is discarded. so no guarantee but openbsd does try to lose anything that was put in swap as soon as possible.

https://man.openbsd.org/sysctl.2#VM_SWAPENCRYPT~2

> Still, it does require the attacker to either have root on your machine or physical access to your disk. If the attacker has root on your machine, it's game over anyway.

How does Windows enforce signing these days? If I run "keeppass_compiled_by_attacker.exe" do you get some sort of prompt?

Without it, even with local user access it's kind of "game over"; there's nothing preventing the attacker from replacing the desktop or start menu shortcut to their own wrapper or own version which steals the master password. No modification of system files or special access to memory or whatnot needed.

And even with it, many users will likely just click through the warning.

On Linux and other Unix-like system this is certainly an issue.

Sometimes I think people are a bit too focused on these kind of complex and advanced exploits, while in reality it turns out you often don't need them to do malicious stuff.

> If I run "keeppass_compiled_by_attacker.exe" do you get some sort of prompt?

Yes, smartscreen

That seems like a generic malware filter/anti-virus? I'm not sure that will prevent targetted attacks?

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