Ask HN: How (un)secure are the passwords saved at my browser?
I found out by installing LastPass Chrome extension (we are starting to use it at my company). One of the extension onboarding steps is to show all sites for which I have a password saved by my browser. Fair enough.
What scared me is that just by clicking at "reveal passwords" ALL of my saved passwords appeared there!! No asterisks, just day light plain text shouting all my carefully crafted long passwords to anyone looking at my screen.
I don't remember giving the extension any special permissions, and even if I did, I wouldn't imagine an exntension could have access to all my plain text passwords.
Is this common knowledge?? Is it THAT easy to find out all my saved passwords?? Am I missing something here?
I would imagine that such a common, widespread, sensitive feature at the most used browser in the world would be more secure. It is not that NSA can discover my passwords. MYSELF, not even being a programmer can discover all the passwords of another person if they let me use their computer for 2 minutes.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 27.5 ms ] threadFirefox appears to be a bit better by letting you set a master password that's used to encrypt passwords[1], although without digging into the behavior I can't say exactly how much that helps.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6166731 [1]: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Master_password
Granted, if you use full-disk encryption, this concern is much less serious.
Firefox does. Chrome doesn't. I can't speak to Safari or Internet Explorer.
Most browsers store their passwords in plain-text, this means there's applications that can fetch all your stored passwords from all browsers and send them to an undisclosed location in seconds given user level privileges on the machine.
By upgrading to lastpass you have reduced that attack surface by using a secure passphrase and encrypted data-store but you have increased your attack surface to anything accessing lastpass servers and application bugs.
With all these attack vectors one might think that it's better to just not save passwords and just remember them, while this is true in theory in practice it's impossible to remember a sufficiently unique password for each website you are registered to which leads to password reuse which is another much greater attack vector where your leaked passwords from one site can be reused on other sites.
In general I would advice you to use a password manager that generates and encrypts passwords (Lastpass is one of them), use a secure passphrase and don't reuse passwords. Password reuse will likely make you less secure than writing your passwords on a post-it by your computer (don't do that either)
I would also consider looking into using proper 2-factor authentication for sensitive login (document storage, email, password manager) but I don't want to bore people with the details there so I'll defer you to do some independent research
TLDR
* Store passwords encrypted (Lastpass is fine)
* Don't reuse passwords on different sites
You can read more about that 1pass vuln here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11212002
There's a forum post or blog post or something (I forget) by 1Password about why this is, and it basically boils down to, it's impossible to be completely certain that the other end is the process you're trying to talk to, so there's no point in encrypting the traffic on the wire. Any process with permission to sniff the traffic (i.e. root) also is capable of intercepting the connection entirely and pretending to be the other end, so encryption doesn't really get you anything. Remember, both ends are processes on the same machine, so you can't use certificates or signatures to prove identity as the keys would have to be on the local machine where the attacker can find them.
> a host of other vulns like the .opvault format not used as the default
It was used as the default for iCloud, just not for Dropbox because of compatibility concerns with older versions of 1Password. According to a forum post from 2 years ago, "In time, all users will be converted to the newer format" (https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/comment/139552/...). I'm not actually sure whether they've made the switch yet, since I already stopped using Dropbox for syncing.
> and too many other vulns to count
Please elaborate. I've heard of far fewer issues with 1Password than competing services. I've certainly never seen anything that even remotely qualifies as "too many other vulns to count". So I'm extremely skeptical of this claim.
> The master password is also a single point of failure and once you get that, you get everything
You also need to have the actual data. I'm skeptical that KeePass is any better. From reading wikipedia, it needs a master password and/or a key file. If you use a master password, that's the same as 1Password. If you use a key file, anyone who gets access to your machine can now decrypt all your passwords so that seems worse. If you use both a master password and keyfile, anyone who gets access to your machine (i.e. to get your KDBX file) and has your master password can also get at everything, and it's also not clear how using a combination like this even works if you're syncing your KBDX file with any other machines (e.g. using Dropbox). Wikipedia also says you can use the Windows current user details instead of a password/key file, but again, any attacker that gets access to your machine now has all the information necessary to decrypt your KBDX file.
> With KeePass even if they have the master password, they also need a key, and a machine ID so a copy of the KDBX file is useless to an attacker (unless the can emulate your machine UUID)
They don't need to emulate your machine UUID, they just need to apply the cryptographic operations to decrypt the KBDX file themselves. If an attacker gets access to your machine (e.g. to get your KBDX file), they can get all that other info too (assuming you even set up KeePass to use that info).
Well in theory yes, but one typically wants to slow an attacker down. I'm not saying a KDBX file is entirely useless, just cumbersome if an attacker now has to replay the decryption using various disparate key parings. Most attacks are smash and grab jobs where all the low hanging fruit is gathered, and attackers (generally) don't lie around on a box waiting trying to figure out the inner workings of your KeePass setup.