Strong support for the strategy of not putting your TOTP/MFA in your password manager, which has been argued on HN in the past.
Agreed, but I think using the same device to access your password manager and for dev is asking for trouble in the first place.
Password managers assumes a non-compromised device. I don't think there exist a password manager that is explicitly designed for a compromised/hostile device.
A password manager + built-in TOTP on a dedicated device is fine for most general usage. Important TOTPs can go to Yubikeys.
That seems somewhat unrealistic? There are many passwords you need to use as part of dev work.
I suppose that becomes a pretty strong argument for passphrases + MFA, because passphrases are much easier to type in manually. But the problem there is lots of services still have stupid/arbitrary maximum password length restrictions that make it difficult or impossible to use a sufficiently complex passphrase.
It’s very frustrating.
1PW just generated this for me: mimp-rort-jan-mon-kain-sqin
Not as much entropy as 24 random letters/digit/punctuations/capitalisation. But (for me at least) much easier to read end type in situations where copy/paste isn't available (like from my phone to my dev docker containers)
Maybe a good compromise is to use 1pw for most TOTP but keep your gmail / iCloud and a few others in an iPhone only app?
Gmail is what scares me the most. It’s basically keys to the kingdom.
We might all do well to remind F&F to print out account recovery codes, and then put some thought into where they'll be safe.
UPDATE: also gotta keep track separatelt of non-resident passkeys tied to Yubikey, because Yubikey doesn't know where it was used for non-resident. If you lose one yubikey, need to sync all passkeys to a new replacement one.
Though I think there is also the option that sites can store some sort of identifier on the key, then this would not work:/
The crypto people tried this with hardware only password managers but they were too annoying. I have a halfway solution of using pass with Yubikey/GPG where each password decryption requires a touch. It does protect against the entire vault being decrypted at once and exfiltrated.
And besides that, ultimately if the computer you're using been compromised, whatever you do on that computer can be mucked about with, so while the password sits safely on the hardware, once you're logged in in the browser, the cookie is just sitting there. I guess you'd get furthest isolation with Qubes et al, but with a regular Linux installation you'd still be exposed with a hardware password manager, if the installation been compromised.
Almost all development I do, and most others, are on our projects or projects we're at least interested in, and most likely dove into, that's why we're developing in them in the first place.
In this case, it seems like the developer wasn't actually developing anything, but playing around with image generation on his time off, for fun, and ended up pulling down a random 3rd party thing and got compromised that way. Very different from "for dev" I'd say.
Besides, didn't most developer start isolating projects from each other when the first npm worms started to appear? I know I stopped running `npm install` in the same environment I do my banking, and drastically reduced the amount of random 3rd party stuff I have, still use all the same device though. Even have a Windows install on the same computer, booo!
Once you have a Yubikey (preferably two, so you have a backup if you damage/lose one) - you may as well make _that_ your primary MFA method, and only use TOTP for services you can't enrol your Yubikeys on.
So just waiting for the password won’t be enough
Does anyone have a description of something manageable?
I suppose the inverse would be starting with a device that offers TOTP/MFA, and then making your password-manager/vault somehow available on that same device. In either case, bringing them together makes it easier for an attacker to compromise both at the same time.
On reflection, I've never actually put my (personal) password vault on my phone, but that may be less of a conscious security stance than fulfilling a millennial stereotype, where certain tasks (like big purchases) are reserved for "a real computer."
Closest I've gotten is having my USB backup keychain in the same pocket, so I could get to it in an emergency, but it's inconveniently air-gapped.
i also force most apps on iOS to ask for face id (long press on app icon to set this).
use intentional spelling mistakes in your password vault, edit the password by hand. you also need to have some way of authenticating login components to be sure your running your version of login, and not a trojan login.