Soft boundaries within the user account do nothing to protect you from exactly those scenarios either. Your protection is to lock your OS user account.
My suggestion is to seriously re-evaluate this approach in light of the actual use-case of how people perceive these passwords.
It appears as though many, many users don't expect these passwords to be visible. This is an important thing to take into consideration.
What I'm proposing is that you just don't show our passwords, all in one window, in plain text. I agree that this won't solve the problem, but would be a good first step. And I don't see how that would be dangerous.
Alternatively, Chrome should make this more obvious so that users don't make assumptions about its security.
How on earth can I convince you that many, many, many people are surprised and concerned about this? Can I direct them to you on Twitter?
I've enumerated this multiple times now, so I'm not sure how else to explain it. The simple fact is that you need to lock your user account if you want to protect your information. If you don't do that, nothing else really matters because it's all just theater and won't actually stop anyone willing to invest minimal effort.
Your software allows me to open up one application and see all passwords. It's likely the single most-used application, and the easiest attack vector on the machine. If I wanted your password, I'd try Chrome first. It's very widely-used, and therefore a huge vector. That is the problem here.
Either change it, or better communicate the need to lock your system. Because to an average user on the street, this is a scary thing to be able to do so easily.
Is there a public point of contact that I can speak to about this?
Justin, can you tell us the real reason Chrome does it this way? Because the reasons you list so far don't make sense.
If you don't want people browsing your passwords, you can't ever give them access to your user account or your unlocked desktop. That's it, that is the entire solution. Any other method of protecting the passwords is vulnerable as long as the potential attacker has physical access to the unlocked desktop.
Now, perhaps some of this is mitigated by the fact that most of those friends, coworkers, significant others won't know how to install a keylogger or install extensions - but some small percentage will anyway, and those users who were lulled into a false sense of security will have been just as exploited anyway.
Also, just because some people will be able to access the passwords with physical access doesn't mean it's not worth doing basic/unsecure locking. I'd rather use a system where people need to have the know how to use keyloggers in order to break, over one where Joe Schmoe can walk in and take everything.
In the end I have always known the security issues with saving passwords so I don't save any banking passwords or email account passwords in any browser.
And what's a better way to make it clear than actually showing the passwords ?
Read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...
Then tell me what's better:
- Asking users to store password, and having a menu hidden in the guts of Chrome's settings that most users will never look at.
OR
- Asking users to store password, and prompting them at the same time that doing so is insecure.
Keeping in mind that the vast majority of users of this software are average, non-techies.
Nope.
Just don't use Chrome. That's an even better solution.
Let me teach you a neat trick (I'll use firefox as an example, but this can be done in any browser because it's a "feature" of HTML).
>Open firefox and navigate to a login page where your password is saved
>Right click on password box and click inspect element
>In the console, change type="password" to type=""
>Move your eyes back to the password field
Oh dear, what's this?!
Protip: Don't store your passwords in your browsers if you let other people use your computer. End of story.
In Firefox you can go to preferences, security, and saved passwords. And News Flash: If you leave your wallet unattended for 30 seconds, someone could take your money. I guess wallet makers should include a warning too?
Incorrect if you set a master password, which Firefox allows you to do and is the reason why everyone's saying 'wtf, chrome?' and leaving firefox alone.
As for the dumb ones, they're storing their passwords on a sticky-post. Or using Chrome.
After all, google's business model depends directly on how much private information is shared over much of the internet.
2) Either the browser demands an unlock password every single time it queries the password store--which is probably not an acceptable experience for most users--or the browser can arbitrarily read the password store when left unattended. There's no meaningful middle ground here. An option to demand a credential before unlocking the store might be nice for nerds, but nerds don't need it anyway, because they can use 1Password (or similar) to do this for them. It's simply not tenable for normals. Good grief, just look at the wailing and moaning that the UAC prompts in Windows Vista generated. Those prompts by default didn't even demand credentials, just a click through.
But this is EXACTLY Justin's point: EVEN with a master password, they'd be accessible in other ways by anyone using his computer, because it's just stored in the keychain - and if they add a master password, people will think that makes it more secure.
The solution here is to remove the show button - don't add any kind of master password - because that's just snake oil.
Maybe (there are simple but very effective prevention methods against keyloggers etc.), but the main point is: it's not all black and white. There are varying levels of security (and varying levels of "hacker skills"). Passwords encrypted with a master password are at least a couple of levels safer than those displayed in plain text.
The more interesting argument here is the "crime of convenience" - where someone didn't want the passwords, but just saw them laying around in plain sight. But that isn't actually the case in Chrome: it's like four clicks. You have to actually be trying to find them.
Not to mention this doesn't seem to be an oversight by the Chrome team - it seems this is 'as designed'.
Why are you more concerned about something he has to go digging through settings purposely to find, than something he is almost guaranteed to stumble across?
You talk about lulling users into a false sense of security but do you have any idea how many Chrome users assume that their saved passwords can't just be viewed in plain text with a couple of clicks? I had no idea until I read Elliott's article and I immediately turned the feature off and deleted all my saved passwords.
If the broadband engineer comes round to investigate your connectivity issues and you (sensibly) watch over their shoulder while they fiddle with your browser settings, looking away for 10 seconds shouldn't result in them having ALL your passwords.
It's about ease & simplicity of breaching the "security" for non-technical people as well as techies.
Or are you saying chrome(ium?) uses the same technique but hidden to the user?
Please Justin, explain the real reason that Chrome does this, or admit that it's a bug and get it fixed. The reasons you mention are just stupid.
Smacks of laziness, especially in a world where it often takes very little to deter people.
On my system, I have installed scrypt and use it as a password management tool. When I need a password, I simply run a shell script I created, type my master password, and the password I'm searching for is placed in my clipboard.
Sure, I could write an extension to do this and I really should be concerned with the security of the clipboard implementation... but, those are fairly trivial (I do flush my clipboard buffer when I'm done).
This would be a simple solution for Chrome, actually. You already have all of the works for managing passwords implemented. All you need to do is add in the decryption process and simply not log the master password.
In this way, even the root user wouldn't have access to a user's passwords (as is currently the case with Chrome).
It's not secure against any attacks running under the user, though.
PS. This was always an issue with Chrome, and it is why I don't use Chrome on my mobile machine. Safari has a similar problem. So I recommend 1Password for mobile computing if those are your browsers of choice.
As far as I know, Safari uses OS X’s keychain which means you practically have a master password (very likely your user account password, although you could use a different keychain). If I try to retrieve a password (either through Keychain Access or Safari’s Preferences) I get asked for my “master password”.
You write about "lulling your users into a false sense of security." If that is true, then how do you explain that the 'show' button only appears when clicking a password? In the name of full disclosure, shouldn't you make that option immediately visible?
Furthermore, contrary to what was posted here, I believe that you encrypt passwords when storing them. On Windows, you would use the user's password as a "master password" in fact. So, kudos for that. But, wait, isn't this a case of using a master password to lull the user... etc? (because, you know, things such as Ophcrak do not exist?)
I am not going to re-iterate what was already written about the cable guy being able to lift your password in 10 seconds, it's simply a scenario you cannot dismiss and it seems strange to me as I would expect you guys to do some persona-based design rather than deal in hypotheticals (cf. "trivially recoverable")
So, yes, Chrome is an excellent product. And yes, from an absolute standpoint, you make valid points. I simply do not believe that you are the only one here doing so, and if you are willing to post comment on HN, then hopefully you are also ready to acknowledge that things are not as clearcut as you make them to be.
Simply gaining physical access to the machine should ABSOLUTELY NOT enable an attacker to extract practically all web passwords in something like 15 seconds, without any special tools.
Are you completely ignorant of how the OS X Keychain works and should be implemented application-side, or are you just willfully ignoring it?
You're thinking of security in the sense of some hacker or someone who has technical abilities.
What about the jealous ex-bf? He asked to use the gf's computer when they were dating, easily grabbed ALL of her password info and now she has to change everything when they break up. You're giving complete technophiles the ability to nab passwords. The question is WHY - what utility is there to make these show up in plain text over just prompting for a master password? What's the use case that you NEED to make these visible so easily?
It's also a terrible, terrible excuse to say 'well, there are other ways to get that info so our security flaw isn't an issue since it's already trivial'.
The fact of the matter is that you should at the very least require the master password to make these other passwords visible. There should be SOME authentication being done here.
What would this conversation be like if we were talking about gmail.com? You think it'd be OK to show in plan text a person's gmail password in the Settings page. I mean, if you logged in then of course you are the only person who should be looking at it.
Basically, you are fighting ignorance with even greater ignorant decisions.
The reason to have a master password to protect Chrome passwords, for most people and in 99.9% of cases, is that not that we fear we'll get hacked by some random jerk. It's to prevent a casual acquaintance from discovering our passwords easily.
At this point, I think what may have happened is that, at some point, the Google Chrome Security made a decision based on logic that had numerous merits, but doesn't work too well in practice. Now that they've committed themselves over and over by defending this practice, they're so vested in this decision, that they'll defend it, even to their professional demise.
Again, I think their original decision not to have a master password was a smart decision, but not a wise one. As an analogy to door locks again, the smart decision is not to have door locks because they're very insecure (think breaking down a door or window with an axe).
It sounds like this Google Chrome security policy will most likely not change until some significant leadership changes are made over there..
If someone starts their first sentence with name calling, you know they're not mature enough to have a real discussion.
In many situations its cumbersome or not socially acceptable to log out if someone just wants to use your browser for a second, because that implies you mistrust the other person. On the other hand, you wouldn't necessarily give the other person your passwords, of course.
I guess what many people expect is that passwords you save in the browser should be really hard to get out. There should be a function to recover them, because it can really be a life saver, and because it would give a false sense of security otherwise. But this function should be in a separate tool, and it could be really cumbersome to use (only runs in safe mode, is a command line tool, displays a full screen warning in red on black, plays a loud fanfare :-), etc.). It should be the equivalent of taking a bolt cutter to your bicycle lock, when you lost the key.
What people want here is not more security in a strict technical sense. Most people understand that you should log out, and if necessary enable disc encryption and/or physically secure your computer, to be safe against "bad guys". What people want in addition to this is a layer of obscurity, a social speed bump. Something that makes it inconvenient for nosey people to see your passwords, that adds friction and shows them they are doing something wrong.
(Oh, and having a master password (that is forgotten after a few minutes) does offer perfect protection against anybody who doesn't know how to install a keylogger etc.. I guess I and many other people are mainly worried about "foes" that are not so technically adept.)
If what you said about studying threat models and securing your computers and users accounts before handing over the system to friends or family is true and valid, why am I being asked a password to edit my Google Account settings. By extension of your claim, I should never have been handing over my system with a logged in user to anybody else. And definitely, the other claim that providing an extra layer of security is a false pretense must be valid in that Google is just providing us a false pretense of security when we want to edit our Google Account Settings which it does not require when we try to edit settings of the individual services?
Why is this distinction between Google's web services and your browser security?
So are all the policies and procedures of the TSA, if not the entire agency itself, but nobody is suggesting that making it a tiny bit harder to get weapons onto planes isn't a worthwhile goal. We argue over implementation details.
I read in a Tom Peters book years ago that if a flyer sees a coffee-stained tray table, they assume the airline doesn't maintain its aircraft. That's an utterly irrational conclusion -- and a typically human one. The solution is trivial: clean the tray tables! SO back to software.
Make it a tiny bit harder for ANY user to view the plain-text versions of the passwords stored in a web browser.
> So are all the policies and procedures of the TSA, if not the entire agency itself, but nobody is suggesting that making it a tiny bit harder to get weapons onto planes isn't a worthwhile goal.
Very large number of people have been, in fact, suggesting since day one of the TSA that the restrictions imposed on travel in the name of advancing security theater are not worth the costs that come with them, in some cases in some states (particularly Texas, but I think other states had started the process) going so far as moving to criminalize some of the TSA actions, until the TSA escalated by threatening to retaliate against Texas (who was the State where this had progressed farthest in the legislature) by shutting down all commercial air travel in/to/from the State if the bill was passed.
So, the basic premise of the analogy you are trying to use here is rather critically flawed.
justinschuh seems to have a deep technical understanding of programming and program security so I will defer to his greater understanding and make sure that I secure access to my computer when I am not physically present.
With all of that, my concern is that justinschuh seems to believe that anyone who has physical access to my computer and wants to do something malicious will have a deep understanding of programming, and that is silly. What about my druggie cousin who comes to my birthday party. He has no programming skills, but if he knew one simple URL he now has passwords to my bank account, my Amazon account and a ton of other accounts that he can use to transfer money or otherwise feed his habit at my expense. Or how about my ex-wife who gains access to my laptop because my daughter needed it for a school project. Now my ex, who has zero programming knowledge, nor does she understand what "threat model" even means, has passwords to all of my accounts including Facebook and Twitter that she can use to seriously harm my social/professional life.
So, you see, I get that you understand the programmatic "threat model," my problem is that you seem to be too smart to see that not all threats come from tech savvy "hackers." Some threats just come from opportunistic malfeasors, and I don't need to add any new opportunities to the seemingly unending list of ways people can screw up my life.
His attitude is very much like an ivory tower academic who is befuddled that people don't follow best practices.
I also get the feeling he's not used to having to admit he's wrong. I guess you don't make it to 'head of security' at Google by having a little humility but his responses are really not very encouraging.
As long as your password keychain is unsecured, EVERY browser does this -- it's just a matter of knowing where the passwords are stored in the browser as plaintext. If you don't want people to access your accounts, then secure them. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either your passwords are conveniently stored in plaintext so you can login easier, or you take actions to secure your account and add a step to the login process.
Respectfully, a fairly common real world circumstance under which this is exactly the wrong choice was described, then ignored.
In response we got "you don't get it, we're staying where we are."
Is it possible that the reason people think you're doing the wrong thing is that you have made literally no attempt whatsoever to explain why you're flying against the best practices everyone else uses?
Saying "we have data" doesn't count, because we didn't see it, and everyone says that while justifying obviously incorrect stuff. I've had people mail my password back to me plaintext then insist that because they're (random important sounding thing) I should just trust their judgment.
And yes, this includes directors of security at first class software organizations with backgrounds in research security and the CIA.
Even if it turned out that you were correct, your current standoffish non-explanation is directly and severely undermining our trust in you. Do you just not care?
Sometimes you're a lot better off explaining than saying "you're too naive to understand."
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> I've enumerated this multiple times now
Where?
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> so I'm not sure how else to explain it
You give the very strong impression that you believe that saying "you're an amateur and we have data" is a kind of an explanation.
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> The simple fact is that you need to lock your user account
"The simple fact is that you need to secure your server, and if you don't do that it doesn't matter that you salt and hash your passwords, and if you do do that then you don't need to salt and hash your passwords."
Yes, that's cute, LinkedIn. Back here in the real world, multiple layers of redundant, superficially weak, superficially unnecessary security have actual productive results.
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> nothing else really matters because it's all just theater
The only theater I see here is "I've enumerated this and I don't know how else to explain it."
Unless you're talking about some other site, you haven't explained it at all, and what you're really saying is "I don't know how to explain it."
Maybe hire a communications person. You're making what appear to be by all basic security books and protocols dire security errors, then saying "I have data to support this decision and you're too dumb to understand what's going on."
Really?
Try us, sir. Closing the door in our faces is not a form of doing a good job here. If you're going to take liberties with our data, please be willing to give at least one good faith attempt to explain yourself. It's not a lot to ask.
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> won't actually stop anyone willing to invest minimal effort.
I think you've confused wanting to stop blackhats with wanting to stop real world situations.
An angry significant other can pull this off. You're not just opening the door; you're opening it ridiculously wide, to the point that the average non-technical user can figure out how to penetrate your "security."
And then you're justifying it in terms of not wanting, through an unknown mechanism, to justify bad behavior, by leaving a vulnerability few technical people know about in place.
I just don't know how to respond to this.
Please share the data you keep talking about. The reason you don't know how to explain this better is that you haven't even begun to try.
Saying "I'm right and you're an outsider" isn't an explanation. It's a dodge.
Or in this case, give anyone physical access to your computer, and they have all of your passwords.
Security through obscurity is not security, but it still has practical uses. You could say that hiding the passwords behind the few clicks it takes is not real security, but it's still more useful than having the passwords displayed plaintext on a sidebar at all times.
Also, I think someone like a thief, jealous spouse, unscrupulous roommate or coworker or the like is much more likely to try and get someone's password to do evil with. The way Chrome is now, all a person needs is 4 or 5 minutes alone with the computer to get the user's passwords.
It seems to me you won't make token efforts to protect a user's password because that protection would be an illusion. So you would rather tell them the truth, so to speak, by letting them discover that their passwords are all easily visible by anyone who sits down at their machine. But if that's really the best you can do (I'm accepting this claim for the sake of argument), why store the passwords at all? Just by offering to store the passwords you are lying to the user, and lulling them into dangerous behavior.
Do you have data that users expect the passwords to be shown, or that storing them and making them so easy to see has any positive effect on users' password hygiene or security behavior? As for me, I know never to ever allow Chrome to store any password. Has that made me more secure? And is that representative at all of the standard user? I highly doubt it, but don't have any evidence either way.
> I appreciate how this appears to a novice
As you are in the process of defending storing passwords in plain form (or at least in a manner that allows them to be accessed in plain form so easily), without any warning that this is happening, I am of the opinion that you have no right to be so condescending as to publicly call someone else a novice.
> but we've literally spent years evaluating it
Some creationists have spent decades evaluating their position too. That does not make my any more inclined to agree with their assessment of the way the universe works, nor does it make me feel inclined to recommend that position to others.
> and have quite a bit of data to inform our position.
Please provide said data so that we can evaluate it, otherwise what you are saying here is simply "I'm right because I know that I'm right".
> what you're proposing is that that we make users less safe than they are today by providing them a false sense of security and encouraging dangerous behavior. That's just not how we approach security on Chrome.
That is EXACTLY how you are approaching security in Chrome it would seem.
If the criticism of the way Chrome currently does these things is wrong for this reason then Chrome's behaviour is wrong for the same reason. Users will assume that the passwords are stored securely, or will be blissfully unaware that they even need to be, and will think they are safe when they are not. This argument may not make the alternate suggestion being made correct, you certainly believe that it is not, but your argument doesn't make Chrome's current position any less incorrect either.
While here we all know that locking out workstations provides much better security (as mentioned in your earlier post) than a master password on the browser's credentials store would, the general public do not tend to have much concept of that in my experience (while it very much should be, it is not something most people give any thought to unless explicitly prompted). Letting them take their ignorance of the matter one step further is lulling them further into a false sense of security.
You are not wrong in stating that users should lock their workstations when leaving them, and should have them set to auto-lock after a time in case they forget. Likewise we are not wrong in stating that any key store should be locked after use, and automatically locked after a period of inactivity (requireing the master password to be requested again).
Essentially you are silently opting in (on the user's behalf) to exchanging security for convenience. This brings us full circle, back to the word "novice".
With regard to my earlier acknowledgement that other vendors do the same thing, while I'm taking cheap shots like the "novice" thing above: "other people are doing it" is no more a valid excuse for irresponsable behaviour here than it was in the school playgound when we were five.
We (by "we" I'm including developers, DBAs, technical managers, security experts, and other members of the technical "community") should be trying to teach users to take better care of their credentials and their information security more generally, making it inconvenient for them not to if neccessary rather than making it easy for them to continue to be blissfully ignorant of the situation.
- Showing passwords in this fashion is consistent with most users' expectations about how their passwords can be accessed.
- Requiring authentication before showing passwords has the effect of encouraging people to leave their computers unlocked in a potentially hostile environment.
Don't forget, all security, regardless of how good it is, is just a delay mechanism. It's perfectly valid to delay the easy attacks as well as the hard ones.
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"I appreciate how this appears to a novice"
Respectfully, I don't think this is a valid answer. This is the same sort of "I know better than you because I'm in the industry" thing that has led Yahoo! to believe that it's okay to re-issue email addresses: "we've done a study that we won't show you, we decline to address your criticisms, and we're right. We wanted to talk to you in public to create the illusion of interactivity and contact, but in reality we're ignoring your statements, refusing to explain ourselves, and declining to adjust."
LinkedIn said literally exactly the same thing about their password strategy right before their plaintext password database got owned.
It turns out that working at Google and saying nuh-uh isn't actually a valid form of explaining the security choices you're making in a way that almost nobody else is aware of. Having worked at IBM Security and the CIA doesn't change that. Whereas you may call the people pointing out the obvious problems in your approach amateurs, your ability to actually interpret what they say seems to be very, very limited.
I would note that your own past employers agree. What you're doing is a violation of FIPS 140-3, which your former employers helped the NIST craft.
No other browser does this. There's a good reason that everyone else does something different.
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"[we] have quite a bit of data to inform our position"
You have quite a bit of data to support that it is not a critical security defect to allow people to pull passwords out of a little known browser dialog?
I find this unlikely, on grounds that I can't even imagine what sort of data would be used to support this.
Am I correct in suspecting that you will absolutely refuse to explain this claim, yet still expect it to be taken seriously?
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"what you're proposing is that that we make users less safe than they are today by providing them a false sense of security"
No, eliminating a hidden attack vector does not create a false sense of security: nobody will know. In the meantime, an extant vulnerability will go away. This is the exact opposite of correct, and honestly fairly transparently so.
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"And while you're certainly well intentioned, what you're proposing is that that we make users less safe"
And while you're certainly well intentioned to suggest that a car should have seatbelts, what you're proposing is that we make users less safe by encouraging them to drive over fifteen miles an hour.
The disconnect between your theory of how people use browsers and how people actually use browsers, as the head of security, making choices like these, is genuinely alarming.
But you have data. Which, conveniently, nobody can see, or point out your misunderstandings within.
Because that's how science works, or something, probably.
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"encouraging dangerous behavior."
Taking away a little known mechanism for people to extract saved passwords from the browser does not in any way encourage dangerous behavior.
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"That's just not how we approach security on Chrome."
It appears that how you do approach security on Chrome is with transparently false anecdotal claims backed up by no measurements, unprovided claims of difficult to guess about data, and no willingness to look at other peoples' points of view.
In the whole of human security history, this has never gone well.
Unfortunately, you have the provenance, and in unweildly large security organizations, that's often quite a bit more highly valued than actually hearing what other people say.
It is absolutely fascinating that Google's browser's head of security thinks it's a good idea, backed by mystery data, to be able to pull saved passwords out.
Of curiosity, do you honestly expect to be taken seriously when you fly in the face of every best practiced, based on data you won't provide, while just calling other people amateurs?
You realize how this sounds, right? Like denial?
Good lord. "We make your passwords recoverable from a dialog you don't know about because if we didn't you'd be encouraged into unsafe behavior."
What unsafe behavior is that? Saving passwords?
Seriously, you're intentionally leaving it weak so that nobody will use it for important things, but then not actually making them aware of that?
Just take it out, then.
Mind-boggling.
Truly, these are the situations over which we abuse the phrase "stockholming."
I use LastPass, and it is possible to set it so that a master password is required before any password is automatically entered, but in practice no ordinary user can suffer the loss of usability there.
Passwords are not actually the thing we are trying to protect. We're trying to protect against a user being able to use your credentials. If they have access to your browser, they have that already.
Maybe requiring you to re-enter your login session password, as a pseudo master password, would slow down a really naive attacker. But it will probably also annoy people who just need to get their passwords for some other reason. I would like to hear more from the Chrome team here on their reasoning but I would not be surprised if a 'master' password just leads to more users storing passwords on post-it notes.
I side my house I have safes, medicine cabinets and a gun rack. Those things are locked all the time, and I only unlock the cabinet when I need to use the items inside the secure container.
So, too, I have a use account login. Sometimes I will hand my computer to a friend (or they sit at the computer, same thing) so they can do stuff. At no point does my friend's physical access to the computer imply that they need access to my bank account details. So those credentials are locked up in 1password to prevent casual theft.
Keychain Access and 1password both require a master password to unlock the ability to see stored passwords.
The argument about "having physical access negates security" is missing the point: there are different forms of physical access. I won't let visitors plug in random USB, FireWire or Thunderbolt devices for example. They have use of the machine, they have physical access. But if any of them made moves to dunk my computer in liquid nitrogen before removing the RAM, I would shoot them.
If the computer is locked, my password safe is locked. If someone steals the computer (or an NSA agent inades my house to freeze and steal the RAM), the key material is encrypted and thus still not accessible to casual inspection.
The attitude of "the NSA can break the encryption so it is not even worth hiding things from the visitor casually using your computer" is defeatist.
Rethink your assumptions. What are you protecting against? Do I need to switch to a guest account to prevent casual guests from seeing my credentials? How does that aid convenience?
I'm so angry right now that I can't even string together my sentences properly :)
> Maybe requiring you to re-enter your login session password, as a pseudo master password, would slow down a really naive attacker.
That's exactly what I'm trying to achieve. It's a real concern for many people. Please show this to a non-technical person and see what they say.
Go to amazon right now and try to change your password without having to enter your password first.
You could lock it away with a one-way encrypted password but the problem with that is it's just "theatrics", giving a false sense of security... the stored passwords are still two-way encrypted either way, or else they can't be retrieved for later use. That means it is just as breakable as if they weren't. Once the hacker finds the password database on your computer it should be considered compromised.
If you don't trust your browser or your computer then you should use a service like LastPass or 1Password, i.e. if you consider them trustworthy to handle your passwords and if you're not on an insecure WIFI network. There is really no other way around it.
I do agree though that all browsers should be more clear about it... unfortunately it's not particularly easy to explain computer security to a user who is not a computer science nerd.
I've removed all stored passwords and stick closely to 1Password now.
"locking" the passwords would require intermittent master-pass entry like `sudo`, this would come off as an inconvenience to many users.
I think people here miss the fact that many users, even if they say they want more security, are unwilling to give up convenience and will switch platforms (i.e. browsers) if that's what it takes to get a smoother experience. In many ways (in this particular instance) security vs. convenience is more or less 0 sum- chrome team has decided users would prefer more convenience which means less security. Chrome team is giving users what they want: ease of use.
So, I think Pidgin’s situation is a bit different and if they would have keychain integration they may solve this differently than Chrome does right now.
[0]: https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords#Isthatth... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6168039
Apple does not require any sort of approval or valid developer certificate to use the Keychain. Any app that attempts to access the Keychain will trigger a system-level notification to the user informing them of what the app wants to access, and allowing the user to "Allow", "Deny" or "Always Allow" the request.
> This is somewhat controversial in Windows, due to its weak file protections, but that's the way things are.
I read this as: we haven't bothered to look into the APIs for this... The Windows file permission model is a lot more granular than the "uid/gid/other" that most people are familiar with from Unix. Maybe this is a problem if you install to FAT32, which Windows disallowed since 2006.
Edit:
Apparently the text used to be:
> This is somewhat controversial in Windows, especially Windows 98 due to its weak file protections, but that's the way things are.
A user MarkDoliner then wrote:
> We no longer support Windows 98, so don't mention it.
But somehow in his editing neglected to make it a true statement.
The reality is that you're using the browser under a certain user profile. If you want to really separate your data from other users using your computer i would suggest icognito sessions or creating different user profiles. If you share your user profile (active user) you expose all this data (bookmarks, extensions, passwords).
Seems logical to me
https://www.dropbox.com/s/kgrrtil2s7hi43j/Screenshot%202013-...
Their first responses to outrage over the Google Maps cars they'd sent out to hoover people's wi-fi information were similarly obtuse about the mysterious ways of the non-machines: It's all information that was freely available to anyone who happened to have a fleet of packet-sniffing vehicles anyway, so what's the big deal?
With Google Glass they seem clueless on both sides of the equation: Never mind the role that facial symmetry plays in beauty or the billion-dollars industries that have sprung up to relieve people of their despised eyeglasses, more data is always better, affirmative? And why would even silly water-machines mind being always photographed everywhere? In many senses they already are! Jeepers can extermination day not come quickly enough.
And now this, here. Yes a given all-knowing cyborg entity could steal a "novice's" passwords with or without Chrome's help. But the easier you make it, the more it will happen. Meanwhile Google doesn't help its case with the clearly deceptive wording within the menus that make this possible. But mainly, our being from Google here seems genuinely baffled as to why this skeeves humans out so much. It just. Does. Not. Compute!
It is their seeming contempt for their customers coupled with a bizarre tin-eared bafflement about aspects of human nature the rest of the world seemingly grasps intuitively that often make for... well, entertainment at any rate; this story is presently top-of-fold on Techmeme. But it also is a window into a massive blind spot that could hobble the company.
I'm glad I have never clicked "save my password" on any browser.
Tools...options...saved passwords....show passwords...
So I'm missing the point why it makes Chrome so bad?
Generaly tho, i don't have any passwords there (all of them are in lastpass), except a few email account ones. Why do i have ANY passwords there? Well, they are being used by an extension that sort of needs them to push notifications about emails. I do have them protected by a master password, but the extension can still acess them. However, the extension has an option to ask for the password if i click one of the mailboxes in its menu. But then again i can still bypass that if i type the adress of one webmail provider, because i will get credentials for it. A good way around it would be if that extension developer would integrate with lastpass somehow, but does lastpass allow that? Now or in the future forevermore?
It has been discussed ad nauseum for years. As is the frequent suggestion to store all passwords via third party utilities or services (keepass, lastpass, etc).
The password protected password manager is the main reason why Firefox remains my primary browser. If my laptop is stolen, I'm confident that my passwords will be safe (although I still do not store banking related passwords.) More info at raidersec.blogspot.com/2013/06/how-browsers-store-your-passwords-and.html
Encrypted passwords are only unlocked in FF during a single browser session after one has entered the master password. Do people not understand this??
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH10698
No idea how does it look like in other operating systems - especially under Linux which doesn't have THE keychain, it has keychains (ie. there's no common api to access a particular KDE/Gnome/etc implementation of it).
With keychain locked, Chrome asks for its password every time it needs to fetch a password - be it showing a list of them or pulling a password for particular site. It's done in a proper manner, and if you hand the keys to your house to that guy... well, you better trust them :)
I have been waiting for so long to bash you on this point. And now when it comes, I'm at an utter loss for words.
What would it take to open your eyes to the severity of the matter? Are you really intending to let this slide away? Putting a master-password or some other level of security over the stored passwords is not such a big deal either that you would want to so actively evade them.
Are you counting on insecure stored passwords as a "differentiating feature" from Firefox?
I had stayed off Chrome for a long time due to the same reason: "No security for my stored passwords". But then I switched because Chrome became very fast and I used LastPass for storing passwords.
I'm telling you this because I'll not shy away from recommending Firefox or even IE10 to other people when they are looking for a browser, because hey, Chrome lets other people see your passwords, just like that.
Yet that may be a good use case for a master password…
What's technically possible for serious malware, or what someone can do with unlimited access to your computer for hours is not the point.
Reality is time-constrained, and UIs that slow people down are useful in this case.
I know, and you know, that locking one's account is the Thing To Do when not at one's terminal, but Joe User is still learning this, and in practice, most people do not lock their terminals when AFK, leaving them open to others in the household/dorm/school/office/whatever.
Yes, locking the account is the user's responsibility, but it wouldn't hurt to help them out, by not making it possible to view all a user's passwords in their chrome preferences.
Again, I'm aware that you could simply hop into keychain and check "show password", but this prompts for the user account password. At the very least, you should be doing the same.
Passwords are normally masked to prevent shoulder surfing, but the presumption is that the correct person is still at the keyboard. When you explicitly chose to show a password, the presumption is that you attempt to be aware of who is around you. If the bad guy is at the keyboard for your unlocked account, the fact is you've already lost.
> Yes, locking the account is the user's responsibility, but it wouldn't hurt to help them out, by not making it possible to view all a user's passwords in their chrome preferences.
This isn't about pushing responsibility off on the user. It's about not tricking users into believing they're safer than they actually are.
> Again, I'm aware that you could simply hop into keychain and check "show password", but this prompts for the user account password. At the very least, you should be doing the same.
If I'm an attacker, why would I use the keychain app to get Safari passwords? Just navigate to the site and change the auto-filled password field to text, or use an extension, or one of the many system-level approaches you have at your disposal. Many of these things are even available as tools that any novice can trivially acquire and use.
If you honestly think that the average user knows how to crack, hack and phreak, you're on another planet.
I cannot comprehend what useful purpose showing the passwords achieves. This falls into the same bucket as eCommerce sites which email the user their password after they sign up. In fact, again, by your measure, why do other google products not display passwords in plaintext? For instance, gmail?
I also note you sidestepped the suggestion of enforcing access control before allowing a user to view these passwords - it wouldn't be painful to implement, and would to a large degree obviate the issue.
Drawing equivalence to sites that email your password is also misguided. The issue with those sites is that, contrary to a password manager, they have no reason to ever retain the cleartext password. And more fundamentally, there's no excuse to ever transmit credentials in the clear over a network. Whereas in this case, we're talking about showing the user passwords that must be retained in a recoverable form, displaying only on user request, and within a security context that can trivially access them anyway.
At this point I think I've repeatedly conveyed the reasons for Chrome's design decisions on this front. Since there's no new information, and the discussion seems to be going around in circles, I don't really see a value in continuing this thread.
It's a simple one: why make it easier for a user to be compromised than is necessary? Why is it such a problem to ask the user to enter their account password before viewing this prefpane? You've not provided a valid argument against this.
As to lulling users - they already are. All of your marketing screams about how secure chrome is, how you don't need to worry about security, and all the rest, so showing their plaintext passwords just seems... silly.
Most users do not have to enter their password when their OS boots, and thus won't know what it is. So offering it in Chrome is an inconvenience for most users, but adds no extra security. Once an attacker has physical access and can run Chrome browser it's game over and they can get everything, even if Chrome asks for a password before showing you the password pane.
Users should be setting up "guest" accounts for their OS and "Guest" user profiles for their web browsers.
As to users who don't set a password - never make the passwords visible.
You're trying to prevent my friends from fetching my email password to look secretly at my self-nude pictures.
Justin is trying to prevent my enemies from fetching my email password to gain access to my bank account and rob me of all my money.
His point is Chrome preventing the former threat, while useful by itself, can lead me to believe that I'm also protected against enemies with physical access. This belief, as we know, makes preventing the latter threat impossible. As he cares way more about the latter threat, he thinks it's counterproductive to defend against the former.
> All of your marketing screams about how secure chrome is
To be fair, that refers to being secure against remote attackers, which is the primary concern of a browser since there's not much the user can do about it by himself.
His argument is that since a person could just smash the windows and open the car that way there's no point in putting locks on the door.
It's just a very myopic and weirdly out of touch position. He seems to think that he's 'training' users to have more secure practices? This isn't the business world. You don't get to blame the user for not being security experts. He should be doing everything in his power to make it inconvenient and difficult to access a user's passwords.
To be honest this reminds me a lot of how Microsoft used to treat issues in their code/software 'Oh, that's a user error. That's not a bug, that's a feature!'. And then when you get pushback you go 'I've discussed this enough, no more talking with the plebes'.
Your axiom seems to be that anyone with access to your computer should be 'trusted'.
In other words, if I hand my laptop to my spouse I am essentially granting her root privileges.
A lot of us are making the point that this isn't true. I may have a wife, children or a roommate who I trust to use my laptop but don't want to make my passwords easily visible.
When I hand my laptop to my wife I have an expectation that without resorting to some special tools she should not be able to find out what my Amazon password is or what my hotmail password is.
Your position seems to be that by making these passwords visible you are encouraging more secure behavior - ie. I will now log my computer into a 'guest' account every time I give it to my wife.
It just seems like you don't get how people ACTUALLY use your product. For many reasons I'm not going to lock my computer every time I give my laptop to my wife or a roommate. I have an expectation that there is SOME obscurity that protects my passwords even if it's just obscurity by not explicitly showing the password. You're not going to change my behavior and frankly most of us are pretty shocked that a) you are so resistant to challenging your own axioms b) you think this is somehow our fault for expecting Chrome to not have a giant 'show passwords' button.
You need to challenge your assumption that the 'attacker' is some malicious agent. Widen the scope to also include the suspicious spouse or the prankster roommate and you'll understand why we think this is a bigger deal than you seem to consider it. Even if it just presents a small barrier I think most of us feel that small 'annoyance' is enough to prevent pranks and snooping spouses.
Exactly. Well said.