I agree it's 100% stupid --- "all your eggs in one basket" is exactly the phrase that comes to mind for me too. Centralisation makes for one massive point of failure. If everyone stored passwords in their head or offline, it'd already make it much harder for attackers but there's no recurring $$$ for services in helping people do that. If people can be convinced to believe fake news, what other irrationalities can they be persuaded to believe? It's all just the power of marketing.
The typical person, as long ago as 2015, had around (and possibly over) 100 accounts. I'm seeing people referring to many hundreds managed by LastPass or other password-management systems.
Using, say, a paper-based system whether in a bound journal or a set of index or Rolodex cards, a 500-account archive would take up most of a journal, or a pretty hefty chunk of cards, and that archive itself would require physical security (though at least data exfiltration would be slower than from a digital archive). It's not the sort of thing you could easily carry around with you, or access from multiple locations, should you need to do so.
In corporate use, the problem is compounded by:
- Multiple people requiring access to systems.
- Both shared-account and multi-account systems (e.g., a shared root to servers, master DBA account, or embedded / appliance devices with a single account).
- Multi-office (or remote / home office) access.
- Multi-device access (as in people are accessing systems from multiple devices).
This doesn't necessarily mean that a third-party service is your best or only option, but it strongly tends toward a managed third-party system being convenient where "convenient" means "our business which lacks a true CISO role would be dead in the water without it".
Mind: I'm not defending LastPass here, and I don't use it. The solutions I've seen in the past which have impressed me most were based on managed SSH keys with SSH access to critical systems, and the bare minimum of shared accounts.
I'd also like to see:
1) Far fewer authenticated services where that authentication is not necessary. For the most part, if I can avoid creating a new account, I do. (My circumstances leave me considerable latitude that many people wouldn't have, in this regard.) Systems based on asserted identity through PGP seem to me one option (e.g., rather than logging in and posting content, you'd post PGP-signed content, which the remote system would vet. Similarly, reading private content would be encrypted against your keys. This doesn't address all account-based interactions, but it does cover a large bit of landscape.
2) Physical-token based security particularly based on NFC or Yubikey-type devices. Keep in mind that an earlier widely-used technology, RSA keyfobs which would generate one-time PINs as a 2FA, turned out to have a nasty vuln some years back.
But fewer accounts, PKI-based auth, and physical 2FA ... seem increasingly necessary changes.
As numerous others apparently do: I use a local, encrypted, password keystore that is not managed by a third-party service.
(And don't even get me started on third-party data privacy doctrines.)
This is partly because so many things want an account now. I have over 500 passwords saved, it would be straight up impossible to remember unique strings for each site.
How many of those accounts are essential?
I create throw-away accounts on the regular.
There are many accounts, but few that really matter. For the ones that matter I take care to make sure I have the passwords. For the rest, who cares :)
If you’re actively under attack no Password Manager, mental algorithm/ password pattern, Yubikey, or MFA will prevent someone from just using your authenticated session(s).
Does that mean we shouldn’t use these mechanisms? Of course not. When the risk is only realized with full compromise—saying XYZ could pose a threat is moot from a security perspective.
ok but that also is prone to a weakness in any part of that chain assuming you even set it up properly in the first place. each piece is another layer that can be hacked or improperly setup.
I'd argue that it is not just about remembering passwords. A password manager also helps you remember that you even have an account. I have a similar number of passwords stored as you and there's no way I'd remember all the sites I signed up for (never mind the passwords) if not for the password manager I use.
If I was diligent I could probably track them via confirmation emails (or self-authored "confirmations" for services that don't send a confirmation email), but I can guarantee that a lot would slip through the cracks if I were to attempt that.
A password manager also gives you a convenient place to store (and share) secrets, recovery keys, SSH keys, and similar bits of security related information that you cannot memorize.
Pick two:
(1) memorizable passwords
(2) bruteforce-resistant passwords
(3) account-unique passwords.
The best tradeoff for me is (2)+(3) sacrificing (1), so I use a local password manager (named 'pass'). That said, I would never trust a 3rd party like LastPass.I started doing this in college, and it's been super easy to keep up and my passwords are pretty secure.
For example, what do you do when you're forced to change a password? You need to remember that this website doesn't follow the rule. There's also the case of password being used by several websites with different names or urls, you need to remember which is the base one.
Also it's really convenient to store other things than passwords in the password maanger. Like some notes, your customer number, which email you signed up with, some PIN they give you...
And how did LastPass fuck this up anyway?
However, that does mean they can attempt to “brute force” the encryption, trying any number of passwords as often as they like - and it seems some earlier versions of LastPass used rather poor choices with that cryptography, meaning the amount of effort needed to make an attempt is lower than other similar services (plus some users may have rather poor master passwords, making them easier to guess).
Consider that many users may have had very guessable vault passwords, and encryption generally gets weaker as hardware and techniques advance.
I guess someone could key log my master password on my device, copy my vault and pwn me everywhere.
Also, when quantum computing becomes practical enough we password manager users might be in trouble, but surely in that case major changes in infosec would be needed regardless.
I'm not saying for a moment that Lastpass are competent (there's plenty of evidence to the contrary), but... saying that this isn't complicated seems a bit much. This is an extremely complex set of transactions where many many things can be done incorrectly.
There's also of course the general as-yet-not-conclusively-solved problem of non-reproducible builds / trusting remotely-updated code.
"The threat actor was also able to copy a backup of customer vault data from the encrypted storage container which is stored in a proprietary binary format that contains both unencrypted data, such as website URLs" - https://blog.lastpass.com/2022/12/notice-of-recent-security-...
The "such as..." without enumerating everything is very ominous as well.
Fortunately for me, I don't use LastPass.
You should do some actual math to roughly estimate what it would take to crack a good password. Use a strong password, use a resource-intensive key derivation function, and you should feel extremely comfortable that your encrypted data will not be cracked within your lifetime.
My passwords-in-one-place software is not on the Web/Cloud. (And I don’t understand why this point needs to be restated in every Lastpass thread.)
The thing is... Your password manager should be offline, not a cloud service.
Why?
The problem here is that a bunch of unencrypted data was exposed, which is really bad and dumb of LastPass.
Exploiting bugs in the end-user web application, accidentally exposing unencrypted data, unnecessarily collecting all data in a single location in the first place, a break in cryptography leading to a total break of security are all failure modes that only affect cloud password managers.
If someone wants to avoid having their vault in a LastPass/1Password/… cloud for some reason, it’s also possible to sync the vault through general use cloud solutions like Mega/Dropbox/…
An obvious way to attack typical cloud password managers is via their web apps, which is an endpoint attack and hence bypasses the encryption. This type of attack is much harder for native, offline password managers.
The part I don't get about these discussions is that Firefox saves passwords offline for me just fine, and I have to trust my browser to handle my passwords already anyway. Sure, I have to manually copy a password between devices sometimes. Happens maybe three or four times a year, big f'ing deal.
There's absolutely no reason to add more attack surface by using a password manager.
- Password re-use
- Formulaic passwords
- Simple passwords that are easy to type on a phone
That are easily crackable
Or performing password recovery every time you want to login.
If one goes with the infosec advice that you should calculate the entropy of passwords based on the assumption that the attacker knows the password scheme, then this password scheme provides zero entropy. So if there is zero cost for the cracker to pwn you as well as all the others that don’t have this kind of leetspeak obfuscation then you’re still pwned.
The issue isn't you or me, it's what 99% of the world has to use. For the large majority of people, a password manager with one super strong password (and 2FA) makes WAY more sense.
What’s the difference, security wise, to an all in one offering that works the same way under the hood, like 1password cloud or bitwarden?
It seems to me that those syncing keepass databases around are just incurring pain without any real increase in security.
Let's say a national security agency wants access to your passwords. They can "easily" make LastPass send a custom version of the client to your browser. This custom version could send your password to LastPass, allowing them to decrypt your database.
To me it seems like it would be harder to ship a malicious KeePass program to a single user. Especially if that user has installed KeePass using their Linux OS package manager.
(though some sites force unique passwords/and password changes, which can be annoying as I have to remember to bump a value mentally for how many times i've been forced to do it, luckily for the most part it's not an issue)
So, for your practices maybe a password manager is a step down. But for 95% of the popular it’s a step up.
Security is a spectrum, and password managers move most people to a more secure stance. You can yell at people that they can be more secure until you’re blue in the face, but most of them will shrug and ignore you.
So you do use a centralised password manager. You just call it email, rather than 1Password.
> I believe there are alternatives that are more secure such as using a mental algorithm that generates a unique password per site.
I’m going to forget it.
Either I use a centralized password keeper or the real login process is the reset password flow.
Using a password manager is probably more secure and convenient than whatever solution a can feasibly come up with in my own.
Everything requires a password and I will not be able to remember them all. It took me about 15 years to finally remember my own SSN.
> I believe there are alternatives that are more secure such as using a mental algorithm that generates a unique password per site.
Being completely honest, I consider this a terrible strategy. I seriously doubt your "algorithm" is anywhere close to as secure as you think it is. Humans suck at coming up with passwords, period, no matter how clever they think they are, and then memorizing those passwords is at least as difficult. Any algorithm that would actually be secure would take far too long to mentally apply to each website each time you visit it.
Fully featured password managers like 1Password can include much more than just usernames and passwords, which increases their value significantly. Otherwise, users absolutely store that incredibly important information in completely unencrypted places, often synced with the cloud, because it is important information that they need access to, and they want to make sure it doesn't get lost. There is tremendous value in having a user-friendly encrypted vault.
Since the entire vault is fully end to end encrypted with any decent password manager (like 1Password), the weaknesses that repeatedly affect LastPass do not ever apply here. The only thing that matters is having a strong password on your vault, and keeping that password secure. It doesn't matter if 1Password gets hacked, no one will even know what websites you have accounts on. Coincidentally, 1Password also doesn't have the same history of breaches that LastPass does.
The only other security risk beyond a weak password is a supply chain attack, where 1Password ships a compromised version of the 1Password client that steals your vault password, but this is significantly harder for a malicious actor to pull off than the breaches LastPass has dealt with, and any software vendor that you trust could be compromised and install a keylogger on your device, which would achieve the same outcome, so this is not specific to 1Password, and therefore I don't consider it very relevant to the discussion beyond mentioning that other people might bring it up.
> That's my personal approach and I think it's a better way to go.
It's really not, but someone who comes to the internet to rant about this stuff is so strongly convicted of their belief that I don't think I'm going to be able to change it, so I'll just leave it at that. I have cared a lot about cybersecurity for a long time, even before I worked in the cybersecurity industry for a few years, which gave me lots of additional exposure to experienced people and current events.
I have never recommended LastPass to anyone, and I would never recommend it to anyone. 1Password is a completely different story. There are valid open source alternatives, which you can self host, but most people (outside of this forum) are not going to succeed at hosting their own password manager, so it's important to find a trustworthy hosted option.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Password_(algorithm)
> I believe there are alternatives that are more secure such as using a mental algorithm that generates a unique password per site.
That gets tedious when you also have to conform to stupid, different password policies on various sites.
If you want to compartmentalize things you could use multiple password databases with different master passwords? The master password is still something you have in your head.
If someone has access to one or more of your passwords and can reverse engineer your 'algorithm' then you have effectively just reused the same password everywhere. Even if you include some amount of memorized numbers or whatever the entropy is probably a lot lower than having an xkcd-strong password in a manager and randomized passwords stored in it.
Employee sends me two emails encrypted. Email 1 contains a list of usernames. Email 2 contains a list of passwords.
Any time I need to access any site, I need to open up the two files that were sent, count down to whatever line that project would be relevant to, then copy/paste the username from the first file. Then do the same with the other. (And hope that I didn't miscount.)
This also doesn't account for things like password expiration. Some of our projects require it, while others don't. I would constantly be receiving new encrypted emails with this info from people, and be struggling to keep the locally stored files updated.
This would then also open me up to higher risk in that, if my computer ever got compromised, or anyone elses for that matter, than then every single password would have to be changed for every single site, and new encrypted emails would have to be sent out.
It's stressing me out just to think about, honestly.
Password managers are, honestly, kind of a clunky and weird idea. I think that the sorts of problems we see are likely always going to be an issue, but until we get passed the entire idea of even using username/password as the standard, than we're going to need a means to manage them in this way. Basically, I wouldn't call Password Managers "secure" but I'd call them "secure-ish". It's making the best of a bad situation.
What happens when you need to change a password on one site? How do you know which password algorithm you're using on which site now?
Why am I asking you this? Because I was in the same situation and it became difficult to track. Now I keep all my passwords in a password manager, my 2FA codes in another app/service, and my recovery codes in the third place that's not connect with the first two in any way. Similarly, obviously, I don't have my 2FA service account + password in my password manager.
So, I use a password manager.
I also found out that I can easily forget passwords if they outnumber 5. Doing creative passwords around websites also does not generate enough entropy if one of your passwords is leaked.
I then tried Trezor/Ledger and Yubi. They are the best solution, theoretically. However, I find myself more than once in a situation where I am at an airport and I need quick access to something through my phone. All options above require a laptop, though with Yubi NFC it might be possible. But that means you are also taking your Yubi everywhere you go...
Bitwarden fixes all of that, or any pw that is open source and self-hosted. I'm using the paid version because 1. I want to support them and 2. self-hosted can be a dangerous option if your server goes down and you are locked out of your stuff...
Using a password manager is one of those infosec memes that gets oft repeated but doesn't make a lot of sense to me as being "more secure". To me it seems like your passwords existing outside of your head in any way is a risk, and to have them all in one place (even encrypted) seems way worse than having to go through the reset dance every once in a while because you forgot one.
EDIT: I was being a bit snarky and I apologize. As some commenters have rightly pointed out for the average person this is better than the uneducated alternative of using the same PW everywhere, and as method for reducing a random person's risk exposure it is extremely transmissible vs the alternatives.
That being said (as a commenter pointed out I should have included this in the post originally) I believe there are alternatives that are more secure such as using a mental algorithm that generates a unique password per site. I don't think that these sorts of things are prohibitively complicated, and I think never storing passwords outside of your head has a lot of benefits. That's my personal approach and I think it's a better way to go.
P.S. A lot of the fault lies with requiring accounts for things that don't actually require an account. Another problem that comes out of the SaaS model which can be completely avoided by just not making SaaS.