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Comment by anonym29 | Hacker News Reader

> What do passwords do on an airgapped system?

Get read and re-entered by exactly 1 person, the only person who's authorized to read them.

Oh, sorry, you wanted to copy and paste because you didn't think twice about the security of your clipboard, whether other userland programs are reading your memory? My bad.

> I'm pretty security minded - the word "security" is in my job role - but my password vault is in Google Drive.

I'm on a corporate red team. People like you with your mindset are why I have a job and why big breaches of F500's that "care about security" will always keep happening.

You don't prioritize security, you prioritize convenience, and security is a nice add-on to your convenience.

By all means, please continue doing things exactly as you do - my bank account and I will forever be grateful for folks like yourself. Never stop prioritizing your absolute convenience!

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> Oh, sorry, you wanted to copy and paste because you didn't think twice about the security of your clipboard, whether other userland programs are reading your memory? My bad.

What do you do about keyloggers?

> People like you with your mindset are why I have a job and why big breaches of F500's that "care about security" will always keep happening.

And attitudes like this are what sours the relationship of regular users (who are not opposed to security but don’t consider achieving it their main objective) and the security/IT/… team of their company.

Provide users an actionable, practicable alternative to their existing insecure practice, or you haven't solved any problem. Ridiculing or belittling your user base doesn't help either.

Sorry, maybe I misstated.

This is a PERSONAL store. Not a corporate store. If this gets busted, I’m out a lot of money, but my company is very safe.

If you have expertise here, I’d be very interested. What is your backup and restore solution? How do you guarantee that your files are safe?

I’m still not sure that we’re using the same definition of “air-gapped” here. From my experience, and air-gapped system is one that is entirely off the network. Like you said, one user, but the system is gapped because there is something dangerous on it. Airgapped systems are used for research. The user should always have root privileges (they can’t mess anything up too badly, and if they do, image the machine or dispose of it in a fire or whatever) so… again, why passwords? What do they do? What do they protect?

> .. why passwords? What do they do? What do they protect?

They protect data/accounts on other machines. Similar to a piece of paper you'd write a password on but probably with added encryption, which would be difficult on paper.

Want to sign into account XY on the internet connected machine? Just look up the password (which might be a hard to remember sequence of characters) on the air gapped password machine.

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