- Millions of people use password managers. They make accessing online services and bank accounts easy and simplify credit card payments.
- Many providers promise absolute security – the data is said to be so encrypted that even the providers themselves cannot access it.
- However, researchers from ETH Zurich have shown that it is possible for hackers to view and even change passwords.
Would having a synced Keepass database with a composite key protect against this?
When I made my database I created a composite key file that never goes online. I locally copy it to any device that needs to access the database. The idea was even if the password got compromised you can’t access the database without the key file
i really wasnt expecting a password manager related tech fearmongering on lemmy today
Don’t store your stuff in the cloud unless you don’t mind someone else accessing it.
If you store things in the cloud that you don’t want other people to access, you better be encrypting it yourself and only opening it locally.
This has been a cardinal rule since day 1.
“We want our work to help bring about change in this industry,” says Paterson. “The providers of password managers should not make false promises to their customers about security but instead communicate more clearly and precisely what security guarantees their solutions actually offer.”
Great.
Now which password vault was the most cooperative and clear in their security communication and which one wasnt?
The author said that they have given the providers time to fix the issues. Now highlight the ones that did it the best… >_>They did gove some advice. They said to go with a vendor that is transparent about problems and reveals the results of their third party security audits. I’m sure if you read between the lines it means they likely reviewed several vendors and chose to spend their time attacking ones that are opaque about their security stance and used outdated encryption or bad implementations of E2E encryption. So all three are likely suspect. Like if 1Password were developed similarly to LastPass wouldn’t they have spent time attacking it?
Edit: https://support.1password.com/security-assessments/
1Password are posting the results of their external pen testing now.
About 1password publishing their pentesting results. Why put it behind a ‘give me your email address’ wall?
That alone is enough for me to instantly disregard them as an option.
Bitwarden did so too.
But IMO your assumption is a bit of interpreting bad/malicious faith into it.
I see it more like they are the more publicly known brands/services that do this and underwent the audit.
I have read the TLDR by the authors (linked a few times in the comments) and the answer by bitwarden.
Bitwarden said the, fixed the issue, are in the progress of doing it or are accepting it as “this is intended/a trade-off”.
What is a bit sad is that they had more vulnerabilities than other vendors. But I trust them more as they are mostly OSS.
I’m slowly moving over to my own manager, I’m still struggling to get it to all work properly on all my devices though.
That’s why mine is a physical book.
Really depends on your threat model whether this is a good idea. If cops raiding your home is part of it, a physical book might not be your best bet.
With pretty much every major company being hacked at some point, credit card companies being hacked, everyone selling our details and data, doge and palantir. Feels like post it notes under the keyboard isn’t that bad of an idea.
If someone breaks into my house to read them I have big problems already.
You have no idea how many times I’ve made that exact statement.
Post its have their problems but at least they can’t be read half a globe away
I use one of the password managers mentioned in the article, purely for the convenience of apps on all my devices, syncing and complex individual passwords. Should I be looking to move to self hosting something instead? Would my host (likely a synology Nas or raspberry pi) not then have the same risks?
I self host via vault warden. And I have it locked behind tailscale vpn. Aside from your server itself getting hacked, which is a risk, this is more secure than having passwords on the public internet.
I host a pi hole via diet pi already, vault warden is packaged for diet pi already, project for the weekend!
Love the raspis, just make sure the passwords are not stored on the sd card because those fail all the time hah.
Good shout! Easy to mount a folder from my Nas on it though
Security through layers. The flaws found here are about compromised server, so hosting your own server is a good first step. Next step is making the server only accessible via your own VPN. And of course hardening the server.
I believe Proton Pass does not have the design flaws shown in the article. For instance, if you lose your password, you lose your data. Your data is encrypted and decrypted on your device.
This is what all the listed password manager claim.
What was done here was tricking the client through the server to do things. So the fixes went into the client application.
Use a offline password manager. Problem solved.
Solves the security issue. Destroys the accessibility part
I just sync it using my Nextcloud instance. No issues.
Bitwarden with a vaultwarden docker container on my home server. Access over a VPS.
I use an offline password manager, and sync an encrypted database with nextcloud. It’s convenient enough, and secure enough for me. Easy to sync between my phone, desktop, and laptop. And I only need to remember two passwords, the nextcloud one, and the manager one. I don’t think you can have it more secure and convenient all the same, at least not with current tech.
Many will argue that they need the convenience of an online password manager not knowing that what you stated is the safest form
I pitty the fool that stores anything important on
the cloudsomebody elses computer.deleted by creator
OMFG can people please fucking go away with this stupid “password managers are worthless” bullshit today. They are exactly as secure as promised, unless you went to the obviously shady ones that use web interfaces. People have been saying this for years, if you want security, keep your password manager offline.
So by that logic BitWarden is unsafe?
Yes, if you arent self hosting the web interface or using the desktop client.
But these issues were patched before even publishing the findings, right?
There is no way to patch the inherent flaw that comes with delivering client software through a web browser. If the entire client is delivered as a web page from a server you dont control, then that server can modify the software however it pleases. Same applies to e2ee encrypted chat clients that run as a web page like element-web (browser based matrix client).
This comment shows that you know less about computers, than you may think. You can definetly make end to end encryption work using a Website. JavaScript runs client side. So as long as you trust the encryption algorithm (which in elements case you definetly can, because it is OSS), the encryption is safe and your unencrypted data never leaves the device.
The point is you are trusting the JavaScript that the server delivered to you. If the server is compromised, it hands you compromised JavaScript and you’re screwed. It’s the exact same thing as going to evil.com and entering your master password. I think that you inherently understand that evil.com is untrusted. However, if passwordmanager.com is compromised by the same people who own evil.com. there’s really no difference.
I understand, but wouldn’t the same problem occur, if the server for the website you download your software from or the server for your package manager would be compromised? Even if you would buy your software physically on a CD, there would be a chance someone has messed with the content on a CD.
So I don’t really see this as a flaw unique to browsers. Am I wrong?
Yes of course you CAN make it safe in theory, but unless you run the web interface locally or on your own server, you cant be certain that the javascript delivered to you from the hoster hasnt been modified. Its like having autoupdates on but you have zero control over when or how the updates take place, because every time you open the page it could be different code from the last time.
So as long as you trust the encryption algorithm (which in elements case you definetly can, because it is OSS)
How do you know that the code on elements github repo is actually the same code that you get delivered from your homeserver that is hosting the web client? Your homeserver can just modify the web clients code however it wants and deliver a backdoored or faulty version to you. Which means you dont just have to trust the open source code, but also the admin who is managing the homeserver and also the hosting provider.
Is this really so hard to understand? Literally the entire client is delivered on demand from a remote server, obviously that is insecure if you dont control that server.
This feels a bit extreme though. Can you even trust anything online at that point? Do you also never leave your home carrying your wallet in case someone might rob you?
Bro i have my bank details, all my private 2FA, work 2FA, health insurance access, my families master passwords, steam access, and more in there. Its literally the most important piece of software that can exist in this day and age. No im not taking chances with that. The only thing you can do with my physical wallet if you rob me is buy something up to 20€ beyond which you need the cards pin. Everything else i can just deactivate by calling the relevant parties.
But on another note, websites have never really been resistant to MITM attacks. So you dont just have to trust the hoster but also everything in between you and them.
I assume you follow proper backup protocol it you are using offline password management.
How do you sync though? You keep one copy on your phone or something, I imagine? What apps and managers are you using?
according to recent findings, it is.
But the findings were patched before it was even published from my understanding?
not all of them, and some changes only apply to new passwords saved: https://lemmy.ml/comment/24008121
From the paper itself:
We had a video-conference and numerous email exchanges with Bitwarden. At the time of writing, they are well advanced in deploying mitigations for our attacks: BW01, BW03, BW11, BW12 were addressed, the minimum KDF iteration count for BW07 is now 5000, and their roadmap includes completely removing CBC-only encryption, enforcing per-item keys and changing the vault format for integrity. On 22.12.25 they shared with us a draft for a signed organisation membership scheme, which would resolve BW08 and BW09. At our request, to maintain anonymity, they have not yet credited us publicly for the disclosure, but plan to do so.
I didn’t look at the response to other Password managers, but the gist here is that the article is overblowing the paper by quite a bit and the majority of the “issues” discovered are either already fixed, or active design decisions.
The beauty of open source
I was also just looking for bitwarden information. Its just the best password manager and has never failed to do its job.
I dont know what they mean with less secure than promised. I didnt expect them to be perfect, and havent read that they promise no security flaws.
They advertise that passwords are only stored on the server in encrypted form, meaning they couldn’t read them even if they wanted to (or were forced to by a government agency) and you don’t have to trust them not to. This paper shows that several vulnerabilities exist in the protocol which could be exploited by malicious code running on the server (injected by hackers or a government agency), which would then allow an attacker to obtain cleartext-passwords. So you do, in fact, have to trust the servers integrity.
Thank you for taking the time to understand and comment, very valuable.
but the gist here is that the article is overblowing the paper by quite a bit and the majority of the “issues” discovered are either already fixed, or active design decisions.
“fixed”. only for new and updated passwords
Or you can change the encryption to argon2 in the settings with salted hashes.
Granted it’s probably not per item but at least something.
tl;dr:
- If the password manager server is hacked and compromised, then syncing your passwords with the compromised server will lead to compromised passwords (duh)
- None of the providers tested have (or have had in the past) compromised servers.
and an observation or two:
- Vaultwarden is free, self-hostable, and doesn’t rely on trust in a third party.
- Keepass (and its client variants, like KeepassXC which is pretty great) is even more secure because there is no server, just an encrypted file you can store anywhere.
How would I know if my own server isn’t compromised? Any of the online password managers have a hell of better chance spotting intrusion than I do.
If the password manager server is hacked and compromised, then syncing your passwords with the compromised server will lead to compromised passwords (duh)
No, not “duh”. The right way to do this is client-side encryption/decryption. The server then does not at any moment know anything about your passwords.
This is what Bitwarden claims to do, and yet we have a paper showing that with a compromised server there exists a vulnerability:
Their attacks ranged from integrity violations affecting specific, targeted user vaults to the complete compromise of all vaults within an organisation using the service. In most cases, the researchers were able to gain access to the passwords – and even make changes to them.
If the password manager server is hacked and compromised, then syncing your passwords with the compromised server will lead to compromised passwords (duh)
What do you mean “duh”? The password managers claim that the exact opposite is true.
Most service providers therefore promote their products with the promise of “zero-knowledge encryption”. This means they assure users that their stored passwords are encrypted and even the providers themselves have “zero knowledge” of them and no access to what has been stored. “The promise is that even if someone is able to access the server, this does not pose a security risk to customers because the data is encrypted and therefore unreadable. We have now shown that this is not the case”, explains Matilda Backendal.
This would be true for a properly implemented end-to-end encryption scheme.
“Properly implemented” is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence.
Four paragraphs down from your quote is this:
Their attacks ranged from integrity violations affecting specific, targeted user vaults to the complete compromise of all vaults within an organisation using the service. In most cases, the researchers were able to gain access to the passwords – and even make changes to them.
If E2EE were properly implemented, the above would be impossible.
Keepass (and its client variants, like KeepassXC which is pretty great) is even more secure because there is no server, just an encrypted file you can store anywhere.
And simultaneously less secure because it’s up to you to handle keeping your vault synced between various devices and most people are significantly worse at keeping systems secure than the professionals at the password managers.
Self hosting a server of some kind or using something like Keepass on a single device (with offline backups) is the most secure option, but as usual with security doing so trades significant convenience for security. For most people who are uninterested in making sure their servers are kept up to date week to week letting professionals handle it is the better option.
I store my keypass database on several flash drives in different physical locations and update them several times per year to make sure that even if I do lose the copy I have, the versions on the flash drives, not at my physical location, are decently up to date, and so if I do lose any of the password data, it will be only for a couple of months worth if that.
If I add things that are extremely important, such as a new mortgage provider, or some sort of financial data into my keypass database, then I do an unscheduled immediate update to all of my flash drives in different physical locations to make sure that they all have that, but if it’s just a social media account, and I was to lose access to it, and not have the password for it, then… I wouldn’t be too upset about it.
In the absolute worst possible case, I stand to lose 3 months worth of data. It’s not often that I have to tweak stuff in my password manager, so that would be very few changes.
Great.
I am now your spouse and you want to give me access to the flash drive. What now?New requirement: I have several passwords I want to give you access to as well. What now?
As with everything: Your solution may work for yourself and a few others. The majority don’t want to collect 5 flash drives in different locations every 3 months to update a file (and making sure it’s the correct vault they have copied)
PThe master copy stays on my device. If I need to give somebody access to a specific password, I just give them that password locally and they put it in their password manager for that account.
Same thing occurs if they need to give me a password. They give me the password. I put it in my password manager and then I’m the one who updates the flash drives on the rotating basis like I mentioned above.
Great.
Now your data is (potentially) exactly where you are trying to keep it out of.So you made it more cumbersome to yourself by keeping your data as local as possible, yet still chosing to give up the tiny sliver of additional security for the comfort of others.
I don’t want to be annoying. But I hope you see what I am trying to convey.
Sure, but at the end of the day even if you don’t update your vaultwarden server or you rely on an insecure storage sync system like dropbox, your actual vault is encrypted with a key that only you know. Even if your server is hacked or the kdbx is leaked, your passwords are safe until someone breaks AES.
Contrast that with hosted services, who could very easily attach their own keys to your encryption key (whether now or in the future at the behest of the state) and you’d be none the wiser. E2EE doesn’t matter much when the other end is controlled by someone else.
I’m not disagreeing that most people just want something to work without thinking about, and for that reason I’m glad that services like bitwarden and lastpass and protonpass exist. My intent was not FUD, just shining a light on the fact that keeping your passwords secure does not require trusting a company.
Sure, but at the end of the day even if you don’t update your vaultwarden server or you rely on an insecure storage sync system like dropbox, your actual vault is encrypted with a key that only you know. Even if your server is hacked or the kdbx is leaked, your passwords are safe until someone breaks AES.
not really the case: https://lemmy.ml/comment/24008121
Contrast that with hosted services, who could very easily attach their own keys to your encryption key
how would official Bitwarden be able to accomplish that? apart from this vulnerability, they can’t use their servers to add their own keys.
And simultaneously less secure because it’s up to you to handle keeping your vault synced between various devices and most people are significantly worse at keeping systems secure than the professionals at the password managers.
It is not less secure.
If the Bitwarden servers are compromised (either by hacking or by being forced to by the government of the country where they are hosted) then code could be run which would allow the attacker to receive your plaintext password and that is used to decrypt your data.
If a user is so horrible at syncing that they accidentally synced their database file to a public Twitter post, it is still protected by AES-256 which can’t be broken by a simple subpoena.
In either case, syncthing is pretty simple to use and is the common recommendation for the kind of small personal file sync that you need here. It also adds an additional security layer, on top of the unbreakable AES-256 encryption, to the whole setup.
These attacks can happen through server impersonation as well. The actual cloud servers need not be compromised, just the user’s browser has to be. This attack can then leak passwords and allow malicious parties to even gain access on the actual cloud servers apparently.
For people interested there were 3 cloud based password managers tested and this is what they found
The researchers demonstrated 12 attacks on Bitwarden, 7 on LastPass and 6 on Dashlane.
What I am wondering myself: Do the different amount of attacks mean the attack surface was greater or had more vulnerabilities or what made them only do 6 on Dashlane vs 12 on Bitwarden?
Edit:
In another article it was total identified vulnerabilities.Is there a reason why these attacks were on cloud based pw managers?
The method, they use, requires a client-server architecture. Hence, they cannot attack a local keepass file even if you sync it to some cloud.
From what I scanned, there was no reason given on why they only attacked cloud based providers.
My guess is that these are paid ones and thus have a ‘market share’, easier to attack etc.
If you attack a ‘keepass’ password the attack vector is more crypto / memory based as far as my limited knowledge goes and not some funky inbetween attack.
Also, if you attack a cloud base provides, you will most likely have multiple victims per breach / exploit, whilst offline are targeted and thus not so interesting in most cases unless we’re talking about a person of interest
they ran the test on those pw managers because they were open source. that allowed the testers to implement a “dummy” provider on their own “compromised server.” so the results of failing the tests are based on the hypothetical situation of “what if bitwarden (or whoever) had an entire server taken over by hackers”. while the chances of that happening are greater than zero, it would take a lot for someone to completely hijack a server like that
edit to add-- these tests are one of the reasons these pw managers choose to be open source: to allow 3rd party tests like this to find vulnerabilities, so they can be fixed
nothing is 100% guaranteed safe, but if you don’t want to remember or write down dozens or hundreds of unique strong passwords, i still would recommend a pw manager
Oh okay so they probably delivered malicious code to the user entering their passwords… Well even an offline pw manager can be compromised in the code.
That’s where most of the passwords are
Unfortunately they don’t explain what the attacks were in the article. Gonna need to find the paper to know.
Yes but unfortunately nothing specific about the strength of any particular option.
Copy pasting a comment that I saw on Reddit
——
Link to the original study (with a less sensationalized title):
A few important notes:
-
the study is about Bitwarden, LastPass, Dashlane and 1Password. Proton Pass isn’t mentioned.
-
the study presumes that they’re working with a malicious server (read this as compromised server, controlled by an attacker). The attacks they talk about in the article would not work on a normal server. Here’s their quote:
No need to panic: all of our attacks presume a malicious server. We have no reason to believe that the password manager vendors are currently malicious or compromised, and as long as things stay that way, your passwords are safe. That said, password managers are high-value targets, and breaches do happen.
- Here’s another quote, about other password managers:
You can ask your provider the following questions:
- Do you offer end-to-end encryption? What security do you provide in case your server infrastructure were to be compromised?
- How do you check that public keys and public-key ciphertexts are authentic?
- How do you authenticate security-critical settings, such as the KDF type and the iteration count?
- Do you provide integrity guarantees for a user’s vault as a whole? Can a malicious server add items to your vault?
You can also ask your favourite password manager to commission an audit checking for our attacks in their products.
- If you still feel unsure/unsafe, then adopt an offline password manager (I highly recommend keepassXC).
I too recommend KeepassXC, works even on android with KeepassDX. I use syncthing to sync between devices (work, personal and android)
I also use KeepassXC, and it’s great. I’m interested in setting up Syncthing between my Android, Linux desktop, and NAS. Do you have any tips or articles/resources that you used to set it up?
Although syncthing is awesome, i use rclone to fetch the latest version of the password database. With syncthing, i would worry about collisions. Maybe would be better to sync it between two devices, Android and Linux.
Hmm, I don’t think I’ve optimized it either to be fair. I wanted to use my phone as a ‘bridge in between’ but that means it uses battery since it ‘checks’ whats online.
In reality my phone is usually on demand and since I work from home, my work device is usually still turned on when I turn on my ‘good computer’ with fun projects.
One thing that I find useful is the backup / version control settings, I’ve set it up that there is a version control if it overwrites things so that when conflicts happen (eg a sync didn’t happen and I changed both keepass databases) I can quickly ‘merge’ them or sync them up manually.
I’ve also heard that syncthing isn’t available on android anymore but a fork (that is somewhat vetted, iirc) exist.
If you can run applications on your NAS & connect to it from anywhere, it could be used as a type of ‘master’ server that keeps everything in sync that is always online.
That is helpful, thank you! I will look into the master server option. I can spin up Docker containers on the NAS.
Is your data in KeePass encrypted?
Yes, it’s encrypted. Wouldn’t be much of a point if it was just plaintext.
Does anyone still talk about Keeper password manager? I feel like I used to hear about that one a lot, and now it has just disappeared off of the face of the earth.
Wish they did an assessment on Proton pass. I just started using all proton services and wanted to know how that holds up. My company uses Bitwarden 🙃
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