12 ms·

Even the LastPass Will Be Stolen

278 points by nallerooth 11y ago

cheez 11y ago
Well-written article and some things I had thought of myself but ignored. It's not that other systems might be more secure, but reducing attack surface is important. So, is there something that lets me access my passwords on all my computers and phones without having to manually sync? Perhaps something + Dropbox?
- tmikaeld 11y ago
  Well there is http://www.passwordstore.org http://www.passwordstore.org that haven't been cracked yet (Afaik).
  - Edholm 11y ago
    Since it uses PGP, it is a bit cumbersome to use on smart phones. At least I thought so
    - rys 11y ago
      I've just noticed that the linked iOS app -- https://github.com/rephorm/pass-ios#readme https://github.com/rephorm/pass-ios#readme -- is no longer there. Not sure if it has a new home somewhere else.
      - tmikaeld 11y ago
        Hm, looks like the developer didn't have time to maintain it. Hardly any commits to github recently.
    - tmikaeld 11y ago
      Yeah, that's the gripe i have with pass - while it's probably safe(ish) to use, it's far from being as user friendly as lastpass.
- distances 11y ago
  I've been using Dropbox/ownCloud + KeePassX/KeePassDroid for years now. Putting the password in is a manual step, but that also means I feel like being more in control. Very happy with the setup.
  - noja 11y ago
    I'd like the password store as a separate process, where I can allow a single password to leave the password store, after I okay it.
  - neuro_imager 11y ago
    As someone with very little knowledge of encryption etc. please advise - how safe is dropbox? I would have guessed it would be a relatively frequent target for blackhats.
    - 4096 11y ago
      I would consider it not safe because it was on of the companies mentioned on the NSA slides. You can still sync your Keepass(x) file with Dropbox if you have a good password (key file is recommended) on the database file. Instead of Dropbox you can also use https://spideroak.com/ https://spideroak.com/ They have a really handy program which let you control a lot of things and they are a "zero knowledge" cloud provider, all your data is encrypted. Snowden recommends them: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/17/edward-snowden-dropbox-privacy-spideroak http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/17/edward-sno... For $12 dollar a month you get 1 TB, which you can use as a safe off-site backup location.
      - gecko 11y ago
        Note that, while SpiderOak is arguably more secure than Dropbox, they rely on a hybrid security model wherein they still have your encryption key on their server, but encrypted with your local password. This matters because if your password is ever compromised, however briefly—say, by using the mobile app or the website, neither of which are supported in a secure manner (they make this very clear)—then all your data would be permanently compromised, with no way to rotate your keys and re-encrypt your data before someone gets access to it, short of blowing out your account. I get why things work this way, but still, yuck.
- tobtoh 11y ago
  1Password allows this - 1Password+Dropbox is how I manage my passwords.
  - darrmit 11y ago
    +1 for 1Password. I guess it gets no love because it's proprietary, but the security design is public and even when a "flaw" was uncovered a few years ago it was nowhere near this kind of revelation. I have tried KeePass, but it's just too painful to keep running..especially as a Mac user. 1Password + Dropbox with 2FA makes me sleep a lot better than when I used LastPass.
    - lobster_johnson 11y ago
      1Password's UI is so much nicer, too. It's a native, very good-looking app on OS X. The browser integration looks near-native and performs all interactions inside its dropdown menu. LastPass opens separate tabs to accept your master password or your 2FA token (at least in Safari), and things like editing a site or copying a password frequently takes you away from the tab of the site itself. Another huge advantage is that unlike LastPass, form field autofill actually works. It will even submit the login form by default, if there are no other fields that need to be filled out.
- mr_sturd 11y ago
  I have been using Syncthing on my desktop machines to share my KeePass database between them. My home server keeps a copy available via SFTP, which is accessible using the KeePass2Android app. That saves me the manual process of updating on my phone, allowing me to avoid using Syncthing, there, which would crush the battery.
- sofaofthedamned 11y ago
  Mitro is really good, probably overkill for what you want though. When it was bought by Twitter they open-sourced it with bits missing. Some have added the missing bits to run it in Docker, but there may be dragons: https://github.com/servomac/mitro https://github.com/servomac/mitro (comes with browser extensions, server, etc etc)
- symmetricsaurus 11y ago
  I know that this isn't what you asked for but one way to dramatically reduce the attack surface is to not upload your passwords anywhere and not sync them between devices. Just keep the passwords on your phone (in a password manager) and type them by hand on your computer. It works well enough since you always keep your phone with you (at least I do).
- daveguy 11y ago
  I have had a good experience with passpack. They use multiple layers of encryption (password for the site, and separate for encrypting passwords). I also have two factor identification set up. Access to the web site to copy paste pws is easy whether you are on a phone or desktop.
  - ams6110 11y ago
    I like and use passpack. I don't completely trust so my primary email and bank passwords are stored only in my brain.
- rmurri 11y ago
  Look at https://enpass.io/ https://enpass.io/
4096 11y ago
There is also QTpass: https://qtpass.org/ https://qtpass.org/ https://github.com/IJHack/qtpass https://github.com/IJHack/qtpass
jld89 11y ago
What do you guys think of clipperz? Is it safe?
thomasahle 11y ago
Could I use multiple services like LastPass, and then have my password be the xor of all of those? That way each service would have to fail at the same time, or I would have time to change the stolen piece?
- kspaans 11y ago
  You have to consider the likelihood that: Given your MyPasswordSpace account has been compromised, will that help the attacker compromise the other services?
- jerf 11y ago
  The XOR of two ASCII password characters tends to produce characters in the control code section of ASCII, which you may have some trouble convincing those services to store. You could define your own XOR based on an enumeration of password characters, but that's getting into a lot of work for this idea... it had better be good.
johnpowell 11y ago
I just keep my passwords on a publicly visible website. fastmail --- 31&84$KsATbUIOPalrwdklwdfjljklwdfljk31&84$KsATbUIOPal$*KsATbUIOPalrwdklwdfjljklw apple --- CNK7wt5a2QcJ2T/qm9J+oc3JUvg/cR/uIrJ2qPgAePk Then I mess with things. Say Rot5 for the last five characters of my Apple password and ROT8 for fastmail. Not exactly what I do but you get the idea. However, setting up the ATV4 took a few hours.
- oneJob 11y ago
  I can't wait for the detailed HN post explaining how this scheme was defeated.
  - diabeetusman 11y ago
    A website with rules like "passwords must be 8 characters or less, contain no dictionary words inside them, and cannot have double letters" would put a stop to that pretty quick
    - johnpowell 11y ago
      I simply don't use those websites. I have never had a password stolen and I can retrieve them if I forget my phone and have to borrow someones to visit my password page. This happens a lot since I find my phone to be a anchor and my life is better when I leave it at home. A few weeks ago I had to return something to Target I ordered online. I didn't have my phone with me but my sister had hers and they wanted a order number that was only emailed to me. So with a pencil and some paper I was able to visit the page with my email password and convert it and login to my email on her phone. It saved a few hours of driving back to my apartment and back to the store.
      - thomnottom 11y ago
        Life is better when you leave your phone at home, as long as you can rely on other people to have their phone with them so you can borrow it?
  - 11y ago
oneJob 11y ago
With the recent security issues surrounding LastPass, it makes me wonder, is the bar set too low even for professional products? Does LastPass not do this testing on their own? Does LastPass not reach out to the security community and contract to have this testing done, proactively? I mean, these folks pulled this off in their 10% time...
- tajen 11y ago
  I don't know, how much is the security bug bounty on LastPass? $1000 according to Bugcrowd [1]. But what would be the right value? That's the only way we ensure it's economically more viable for hackers to resell their security leaks to LastPass than to pirates. An economic approach would claim that the total available bug bounty scheme must be worth the same as the potential stolen value of the contents, otherwise it's still valuable to exploit the leak rather than publish them. The only savings that LastPass can make is over the gap between insured value and their ability to not have leaks. [1] https://bugcrowd.com/lastpass https://bugcrowd.com/lastpass
  - josefresco 11y ago
    I doubt most small businesses could afford a bug bounty that would exceed potential illegal profits from selling an exploit to bad actors. I don't think the economics work at any scale. Could Google, Apple or Microsoft even outbid a nation state seeking to purchase an exploit?
    - nhstanley 11y ago
      No, but I think as long as the bug bounties pay enough to keep someone comfortable (along with added notoriety/resume padding with it), you'll have enough moral people choosing to reveal them to the companies rather than bad actors. Maybe that's naive. $1k bucks though probably isn't that number. More like $50k or $100k for 0-day level stuff.
      - emodendroket 11y ago
verbify 11y ago
LastPass always represented a single point of failure for me, although still bettter than what people usually do - same password across all services. I recall one interesting method involving no third-party services is a concatenation of a random string combined with some of the letters of the service I'm using. E.g. the first and last letters of the website I'm on. So if the random string is xPv4rz and I'm on HackerNews, the string becomes hsxPv4rz.
- jjoonathan 11y ago
  The problem is that you don't have control over password requirements, so you'll rapidly accumulate exceptions. What if they require (or assign) a PIN? Security questions? What if they assign a number as your login? Require a special character? Forbid special characters? Require >6 chars? Forbid >6 chars? Forbid your password from matching previous passwords? What if they don't show you the domain? What if the domain changes during login (see: Cambridge Savings Bank)? What if the domain changes over time? What if the company name changes? What if they lock you out after 3 attempts and you burn up all three trying to remember the variation you were forced to use? I tried the combination scheme for a bit over a year. I was in denial about how poorly it was working until I started getting politely teased by casual acquaintances about being the guy who could never remember his passwords. There are accounts I'm still permanently locked out of. It was bad. By comparison, LastPass has been great. More secure passwords, less forgetting them. Eventually I want to move to a password archive that's physically separate from the computer, but for now I'm happy with no longer dreading login screens.
  - tripzilch 11y ago
    Well regardless of your scheme, you should still write down your passwords! Just because it's not feasible to lug a moleskine with that long long list of passwords to everywhere as a "password manager" solution, doesn't mean that you shouldn't write them in that notebook, which you store in a safe place. Not for quick & easy access, but for backups. You don't have to do it on paper, but it's a good choice because it's low-tech, easy for anyone to use (bus-factor, next-of-kin) and exactly as secure as your common sense, making it exactly as secure as anything else you can use. Being unable to access accounts, because you forgot the passwords, that you didn't write down anywhere is equivalent to losing data because you didn't make backups. Which we also tease people about, right? Have you written down your LastPass master-password anywhere?
plusquamperfekt 11y ago
PasswordSafe + DropBox http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/ http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/
- uptown 11y ago
  Dropbox is the weak link, as your encrypted datafile is likely accessible to a determined 3rd party.
  - coldpie 11y ago
    If an attacker is able to find my storage repo, identify my database file, discover what type of encryption I'm using, and figure out the key to decrypt it, then you know what, they've earned my credentials :)
  - plusquamperfekt 11y ago
    The psafe3 file is encrypted.
amelius 11y ago
Product idea: a smartwatch with stored passwords combined with an USB plug-adapter for a keyboard (daisy-chain style). Eventually, computer manufacturers could incorporate the USB adapter into the computer itself.
- why-el 11y ago
  What if you lose the watch?
  - samtp 11y ago
    Just sew it into your arm. Problem solved, unless you lose your arm that is...
    - noxToken 11y ago
      Buy two and sew the other to your other arm. Problem solved, unless you lose your other arm that is...
      - RobotCaleb 11y ago
        Sew the first arm to your other arm.
- virusduck 11y ago
  https://www.blooky.com/ https://www.blooky.com/ Although, I'm not sure they met their kickstarter goal.
  - owenversteeg 11y ago
    Nope, not met. $4001/$250k. Ouch. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/339603800/blooky-wireless-bluetooth-password-key https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/339603800/blooky-wirele...
Bedon292 11y ago
If we choose to still use LastPass, what are the best practices to make these exploits less usable? They have some at the bottom, but I was wondering if they missed any. Looks like there is an option to disable store dOTP on each machines? Kind of a pain to change on every device, but OK. Sounds like a good idea. What else is there?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- nissehulth 11y ago
  There are some good recommendations at the end of the article/presentation, but also note that Lastpass seems to have fixed (at least some of) the issues already.
mohsinr 11y ago
Thank you for sharing! Lastpass user here -country restriction enabled - CHECK -2fa enabled - CHECK -TOR disabled - CHECK
- el_duderino 11y ago
  Where is disabling TOR connections in LP settings? Can't seem to find it.
  - mipapage 11y ago
    Vault -> Account Settings -> Show Advanced settings
    - el_duderino 11y ago
      Ah! Not sure how I missed that, thanks.
      - mipapage 11y ago
        You're welcome!
nilved 11y ago
LastPass has jumped the shark. Major vulnerabilities were disclosed in 2011 and now 2015. Their purchase by LogMeIn is not inspiring. I closed my account and started using KeePass (by way of KeePassDroid) stored in Google Drive. This way only I control the encrypted data.
- tP5n 11y ago
  Data uploaded to Google Drive is not data only you control. You may believe only you control the unencrypted data, but that is up for you to decide. If you read the entire post the author states: "To finish, we want to point out that the security team at LastPass responded very quickly to all our reports and lot of the issues were fixed in just a couple days. It was very easy to communicate and work with them. We have seen media and tweets mentioning that we “hacked LastPass”. We did not hack LastPass. We also don’t feel comfortable with those claims. What we did is find a number of bugs, bad practices and design issues which we used to obtain the vault key and decrypt all passwords in different scenarios. There is no bug-free software and any future research on other password managers would likely have similar results." ... which is doubly worrying if you do not control the data you believe to be securely encrypted.
ultramancool 11y ago
I'm a LastPass user and everything here was pretty much as I expected with one exception - the unencrypted metadata in the vault. That's extremely disappointing. The ECB stuff isn't really used any longer, the OTPs are kind of hacked on, no surprise there. I was willing to tolerate that stuff for an overall decent solution. But now realizing that they're handling URLs in this way... I just can't use it anymore or recommend it in good faith. So what do I do? - KeePass looks nice, has multiplatform support and browser extensions but the crpytography in it is sketchy, custom KDF and stuff going on... mobile support might also not be so great though I'm not positive. - PasswordSafe has better looking cryptography, though still not up to where I'd like it to be as well as a worse UI, worse browser support, etc. And last I checked I think Linux support was sketchy. - There are an infinite number of questionable proprietary solutions that have similar problems to LastPass, usually far worse actually... - and a few open source solutions that look good but completely lack in the UI and integration departments. So I'm about to take KeePass, gut the crypto, replace it with simple scrypt and AES-OCB or chacha20-poly1305 and hope I can wind up with something I'm comfortable using - anyone have a better suggestion?
- caskance 11y ago
  KeePass is open source. If you feel like you can do a better job in certain aspects, please consider sharing those changes so that others can benefit.
  - ultramancool 11y ago
    Of course, any eyes I can get on that sort of cryptographic code are invaluable. Applied cryptography is easy to fuck up, as we see time and time again. I'm seriously hoping someone gives me a better solution though, it'd be very nice if somebody had just done this right from the ground up.
- bargl 11y ago
  I felt the same way until I read the conclusion, "we want to point out that the security team at LastPass responded very quickly to all our reports and lot of the issues were fixed in just a couple days. It was very easy to communicate and work with them." That is why I use LastPass. Because they aren't perfect, but they realize that their reputation for taking any vulnerability very seriously is the most important asset they have. I have heard great things about KeePass so if you make that switch good on you. Edit: Added "very seriously" above.
Roritharr 11y ago
The only workable self-hosted solution I found was TeamPass, but i'm nowhere knowledgable about itsec to make an audit. https://github.com/nilsteampassnet/TeamPass https://github.com/nilsteampassnet/TeamPass
- Vendan 11y ago
  It may have changed recently, but as of about a year ago, a TeamPass installation on a corporate network was my ticket as a pen tester to go from plugging into the network to domain admin in 4 hours. Not the best of signs.
chinathrow 11y ago
"What I am saying is that LastPass adds Javascript payloads to your encrypted vault in cleartext. Javascript code that will be injected and run in every page load in the domain’s context. While this is a legitimate feature, it gives LastPass the possibility of stealing all your credentials." Ouch ouch ouch. How did they think that was a good idea anyway?
VLM 11y ago
Its interesting that the unix world outlook of simple tools doing one thing make this simple. My encryption layer is encfs, my storage and sync layer is dropbox (although I used unison a long time ago) and I don't use the browser interface layer so I hand type passwords. At least this way I never forget any. Oh and for password creation I use pwgen for important stuff (the credit union) and silly names for unimportant stuff (social media) Individually those small simple tools are well optimized and pretty safe. Yet monolithic top to bottom windows style all in one solutions always fail miserably such that it smells impossible to actually implement. Which it might be, for practical, and possibly legal, reasons. This is interesting because its a real world example of what happens if you let the general public be unix sysadmins. It is possible, that just like some knowledge is only for the cognitive elite, some computer automations and features are inherently by the complexity of what they do, only for the computational elite. If this isn't a specific example of something on that borderland, its an interesting topic to think about in general.
dbg31415 11y ago
Fucking depressing. Thanks.
noondip 11y ago
165 sloc of bash + gpg = https://github.com/drduh/pwd.sh/ https://github.com/drduh/pwd.sh/
sfilipov 11y ago
Whenever an article like that appears about a proprietary password manager, I just wonder if there has been any audit on the popular open source ones like KeePass. In fact I've heard that KeePass has some security issues. Is KeePass more secure?

278 points by nallerooth 11y ago

cheez 11y ago

Well-written article and some things I had thought of myself but ignored. It's not that other systems might be more secure, but reducing attack surface is important. So, is there something that lets me access my passwords on all my computers and phones without having to manually sync? Perhaps something + Dropbox?

tmikaeld 11y ago
Well there is http://www.passwordstore.org http://www.passwordstore.org that haven't been cracked yet (Afaik).
- Edholm 11y ago
  Since it uses PGP, it is a bit cumbersome to use on smart phones. At least I thought so
  - rys 11y ago
    I've just noticed that the linked iOS app -- https://github.com/rephorm/pass-ios#readme https://github.com/rephorm/pass-ios#readme -- is no longer there. Not sure if it has a new home somewhere else.
    - tmikaeld 11y ago
      Hm, looks like the developer didn't have time to maintain it. Hardly any commits to github recently.
  - tmikaeld 11y ago
    Yeah, that's the gripe i have with pass - while it's probably safe(ish) to use, it's far from being as user friendly as lastpass.
distances 11y ago
I've been using Dropbox/ownCloud + KeePassX/KeePassDroid for years now. Putting the password in is a manual step, but that also means I feel like being more in control. Very happy with the setup.
- noja 11y ago
  I'd like the password store as a separate process, where I can allow a single password to leave the password store, after I okay it.
- neuro_imager 11y ago
  As someone with very little knowledge of encryption etc. please advise - how safe is dropbox? I would have guessed it would be a relatively frequent target for blackhats.
  - 4096 11y ago
    I would consider it not safe because it was on of the companies mentioned on the NSA slides. You can still sync your Keepass(x) file with Dropbox if you have a good password (key file is recommended) on the database file. Instead of Dropbox you can also use https://spideroak.com/ https://spideroak.com/ They have a really handy program which let you control a lot of things and they are a "zero knowledge" cloud provider, all your data is encrypted. Snowden recommends them: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/17/edward-snowden-dropbox-privacy-spideroak http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/17/edward-sno... For $12 dollar a month you get 1 TB, which you can use as a safe off-site backup location.
    - gecko 11y ago
      Note that, while SpiderOak is arguably more secure than Dropbox, they rely on a hybrid security model wherein they still have your encryption key on their server, but encrypted with your local password. This matters because if your password is ever compromised, however briefly—say, by using the mobile app or the website, neither of which are supported in a secure manner (they make this very clear)—then all your data would be permanently compromised, with no way to rotate your keys and re-encrypt your data before someone gets access to it, short of blowing out your account. I get why things work this way, but still, yuck.
tobtoh 11y ago
1Password allows this - 1Password+Dropbox is how I manage my passwords.
- darrmit 11y ago
  +1 for 1Password. I guess it gets no love because it's proprietary, but the security design is public and even when a "flaw" was uncovered a few years ago it was nowhere near this kind of revelation. I have tried KeePass, but it's just too painful to keep running..especially as a Mac user. 1Password + Dropbox with 2FA makes me sleep a lot better than when I used LastPass.
  - lobster_johnson 11y ago
    1Password's UI is so much nicer, too. It's a native, very good-looking app on OS X. The browser integration looks near-native and performs all interactions inside its dropdown menu. LastPass opens separate tabs to accept your master password or your 2FA token (at least in Safari), and things like editing a site or copying a password frequently takes you away from the tab of the site itself. Another huge advantage is that unlike LastPass, form field autofill actually works. It will even submit the login form by default, if there are no other fields that need to be filled out.
mr_sturd 11y ago
I have been using Syncthing on my desktop machines to share my KeePass database between them. My home server keeps a copy available via SFTP, which is accessible using the KeePass2Android app. That saves me the manual process of updating on my phone, allowing me to avoid using Syncthing, there, which would crush the battery.
sofaofthedamned 11y ago
Mitro is really good, probably overkill for what you want though. When it was bought by Twitter they open-sourced it with bits missing. Some have added the missing bits to run it in Docker, but there may be dragons: https://github.com/servomac/mitro https://github.com/servomac/mitro (comes with browser extensions, server, etc etc)
symmetricsaurus 11y ago
I know that this isn't what you asked for but one way to dramatically reduce the attack surface is to not upload your passwords anywhere and not sync them between devices. Just keep the passwords on your phone (in a password manager) and type them by hand on your computer. It works well enough since you always keep your phone with you (at least I do).
daveguy 11y ago
I have had a good experience with passpack. They use multiple layers of encryption (password for the site, and separate for encrypting passwords). I also have two factor identification set up. Access to the web site to copy paste pws is easy whether you are on a phone or desktop.
- ams6110 11y ago
  I like and use passpack. I don't completely trust so my primary email and bank passwords are stored only in my brain.
rmurri 11y ago
Look at https://enpass.io/ https://enpass.io/

4096 11y ago

There is also QTpass: https://qtpass.org/ https://qtpass.org/ https://github.com/IJHack/qtpass https://github.com/IJHack/qtpass

jld89 11y ago

What do you guys think of clipperz? Is it safe?

thomasahle 11y ago

Could I use multiple services like LastPass, and then have my password be the xor of all of those? That way each service would have to fail at the same time, or I would have time to change the stolen piece?

kspaans 11y ago
You have to consider the likelihood that: Given your MyPasswordSpace account has been compromised, will that help the attacker compromise the other services?
jerf 11y ago
The XOR of two ASCII password characters tends to produce characters in the control code section of ASCII, which you may have some trouble convincing those services to store. You could define your own XOR based on an enumeration of password characters, but that's getting into a lot of work for this idea... it had better be good.

johnpowell 11y ago

I just keep my passwords on a publicly visible website. fastmail --- 31&84$KsATbUIOPalrwdklwdfjljklwdfljk31&84$KsATbUIOPal$*KsATbUIOPalrwdklwdfjljklw apple --- CNK7wt5a2QcJ2T/qm9J+oc3JUvg/cR/uIrJ2qPgAePk Then I mess with things. Say Rot5 for the last five characters of my Apple password and ROT8 for fastmail. Not exactly what I do but you get the idea. However, setting up the ATV4 took a few hours.

oneJob 11y ago
I can't wait for the detailed HN post explaining how this scheme was defeated.
- diabeetusman 11y ago
  A website with rules like "passwords must be 8 characters or less, contain no dictionary words inside them, and cannot have double letters" would put a stop to that pretty quick
  - johnpowell 11y ago
    I simply don't use those websites. I have never had a password stolen and I can retrieve them if I forget my phone and have to borrow someones to visit my password page. This happens a lot since I find my phone to be a anchor and my life is better when I leave it at home. A few weeks ago I had to return something to Target I ordered online. I didn't have my phone with me but my sister had hers and they wanted a order number that was only emailed to me. So with a pencil and some paper I was able to visit the page with my email password and convert it and login to my email on her phone. It saved a few hours of driving back to my apartment and back to the store.
    - thomnottom 11y ago
      Life is better when you leave your phone at home, as long as you can rely on other people to have their phone with them so you can borrow it?
- 11y ago

oneJob 11y ago

With the recent security issues surrounding LastPass, it makes me wonder, is the bar set too low even for professional products? Does LastPass not do this testing on their own? Does LastPass not reach out to the security community and contract to have this testing done, proactively? I mean, these folks pulled this off in their 10% time...

tajen 11y ago
I don't know, how much is the security bug bounty on LastPass? $1000 according to Bugcrowd [1]. But what would be the right value? That's the only way we ensure it's economically more viable for hackers to resell their security leaks to LastPass than to pirates. An economic approach would claim that the total available bug bounty scheme must be worth the same as the potential stolen value of the contents, otherwise it's still valuable to exploit the leak rather than publish them. The only savings that LastPass can make is over the gap between insured value and their ability to not have leaks. [1] https://bugcrowd.com/lastpass https://bugcrowd.com/lastpass
- josefresco 11y ago
  I doubt most small businesses could afford a bug bounty that would exceed potential illegal profits from selling an exploit to bad actors. I don't think the economics work at any scale. Could Google, Apple or Microsoft even outbid a nation state seeking to purchase an exploit?
  - nhstanley 11y ago
    No, but I think as long as the bug bounties pay enough to keep someone comfortable (along with added notoriety/resume padding with it), you'll have enough moral people choosing to reveal them to the companies rather than bad actors. Maybe that's naive. $1k bucks though probably isn't that number. More like $50k or $100k for 0-day level stuff.
    - emodendroket 11y ago

verbify 11y ago

LastPass always represented a single point of failure for me, although still bettter than what people usually do - same password across all services. I recall one interesting method involving no third-party services is a concatenation of a random string combined with some of the letters of the service I'm using. E.g. the first and last letters of the website I'm on. So if the random string is xPv4rz and I'm on HackerNews, the string becomes hsxPv4rz.

jjoonathan 11y ago
The problem is that you don't have control over password requirements, so you'll rapidly accumulate exceptions. What if they require (or assign) a PIN? Security questions? What if they assign a number as your login? Require a special character? Forbid special characters? Require >6 chars? Forbid >6 chars? Forbid your password from matching previous passwords? What if they don't show you the domain? What if the domain changes during login (see: Cambridge Savings Bank)? What if the domain changes over time? What if the company name changes? What if they lock you out after 3 attempts and you burn up all three trying to remember the variation you were forced to use? I tried the combination scheme for a bit over a year. I was in denial about how poorly it was working until I started getting politely teased by casual acquaintances about being the guy who could never remember his passwords. There are accounts I'm still permanently locked out of. It was bad. By comparison, LastPass has been great. More secure passwords, less forgetting them. Eventually I want to move to a password archive that's physically separate from the computer, but for now I'm happy with no longer dreading login screens.
- tripzilch 11y ago
  Well regardless of your scheme, you should still write down your passwords! Just because it's not feasible to lug a moleskine with that long long list of passwords to everywhere as a "password manager" solution, doesn't mean that you shouldn't write them in that notebook, which you store in a safe place. Not for quick & easy access, but for backups. You don't have to do it on paper, but it's a good choice because it's low-tech, easy for anyone to use (bus-factor, next-of-kin) and exactly as secure as your common sense, making it exactly as secure as anything else you can use. Being unable to access accounts, because you forgot the passwords, that you didn't write down anywhere is equivalent to losing data because you didn't make backups. Which we also tease people about, right? Have you written down your LastPass master-password anywhere?

plusquamperfekt 11y ago

PasswordSafe + DropBox http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/ http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/

uptown 11y ago
Dropbox is the weak link, as your encrypted datafile is likely accessible to a determined 3rd party.
- coldpie 11y ago
  If an attacker is able to find my storage repo, identify my database file, discover what type of encryption I'm using, and figure out the key to decrypt it, then you know what, they've earned my credentials :)
- plusquamperfekt 11y ago
  The psafe3 file is encrypted.

amelius 11y ago

Product idea: a smartwatch with stored passwords combined with an USB plug-adapter for a keyboard (daisy-chain style). Eventually, computer manufacturers could incorporate the USB adapter into the computer itself.

why-el 11y ago
What if you lose the watch?
- samtp 11y ago
  Just sew it into your arm. Problem solved, unless you lose your arm that is...
  - noxToken 11y ago
    Buy two and sew the other to your other arm. Problem solved, unless you lose your other arm that is...
    - RobotCaleb 11y ago
      Sew the first arm to your other arm.
virusduck 11y ago
https://www.blooky.com/ https://www.blooky.com/ Although, I'm not sure they met their kickstarter goal.
- owenversteeg 11y ago
  Nope, not met. $4001/$250k. Ouch. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/339603800/blooky-wireless-bluetooth-password-key https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/339603800/blooky-wirele...

Bedon292 11y ago

If we choose to still use LastPass, what are the best practices to make these exploits less usable? They have some at the bottom, but I was wondering if they missed any. Looks like there is an option to disable store dOTP on each machines? Kind of a pain to change on every device, but OK. Sounds like a good idea. What else is there?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nissehulth 11y ago
There are some good recommendations at the end of the article/presentation, but also note that Lastpass seems to have fixed (at least some of) the issues already.

mohsinr 11y ago

Thank you for sharing! Lastpass user here -country restriction enabled - CHECK -2fa enabled - CHECK -TOR disabled - CHECK

el_duderino 11y ago
Where is disabling TOR connections in LP settings? Can't seem to find it.
- mipapage 11y ago
  Vault -> Account Settings -> Show Advanced settings
  - el_duderino 11y ago
    Ah! Not sure how I missed that, thanks.
    - mipapage 11y ago
      You're welcome!

nilved 11y ago

LastPass has jumped the shark. Major vulnerabilities were disclosed in 2011 and now 2015. Their purchase by LogMeIn is not inspiring. I closed my account and started using KeePass (by way of KeePassDroid) stored in Google Drive. This way only I control the encrypted data.

tP5n 11y ago
Data uploaded to Google Drive is not data only you control. You may believe only you control the unencrypted data, but that is up for you to decide. If you read the entire post the author states: "To finish, we want to point out that the security team at LastPass responded very quickly to all our reports and lot of the issues were fixed in just a couple days. It was very easy to communicate and work with them. We have seen media and tweets mentioning that we “hacked LastPass”. We did not hack LastPass. We also don’t feel comfortable with those claims. What we did is find a number of bugs, bad practices and design issues which we used to obtain the vault key and decrypt all passwords in different scenarios. There is no bug-free software and any future research on other password managers would likely have similar results." ... which is doubly worrying if you do not control the data you believe to be securely encrypted.

ultramancool 11y ago

I'm a LastPass user and everything here was pretty much as I expected with one exception - the unencrypted metadata in the vault. That's extremely disappointing. The ECB stuff isn't really used any longer, the OTPs are kind of hacked on, no surprise there. I was willing to tolerate that stuff for an overall decent solution. But now realizing that they're handling URLs in this way... I just can't use it anymore or recommend it in good faith. So what do I do? - KeePass looks nice, has multiplatform support and browser extensions but the crpytography in it is sketchy, custom KDF and stuff going on... mobile support might also not be so great though I'm not positive. - PasswordSafe has better looking cryptography, though still not up to where I'd like it to be as well as a worse UI, worse browser support, etc. And last I checked I think Linux support was sketchy. - There are an infinite number of questionable proprietary solutions that have similar problems to LastPass, usually far worse actually... - and a few open source solutions that look good but completely lack in the UI and integration departments. So I'm about to take KeePass, gut the crypto, replace it with simple scrypt and AES-OCB or chacha20-poly1305 and hope I can wind up with something I'm comfortable using - anyone have a better suggestion?

caskance 11y ago
KeePass is open source. If you feel like you can do a better job in certain aspects, please consider sharing those changes so that others can benefit.
- ultramancool 11y ago
  Of course, any eyes I can get on that sort of cryptographic code are invaluable. Applied cryptography is easy to fuck up, as we see time and time again. I'm seriously hoping someone gives me a better solution though, it'd be very nice if somebody had just done this right from the ground up.
bargl 11y ago
I felt the same way until I read the conclusion, "we want to point out that the security team at LastPass responded very quickly to all our reports and lot of the issues were fixed in just a couple days. It was very easy to communicate and work with them." That is why I use LastPass. Because they aren't perfect, but they realize that their reputation for taking any vulnerability very seriously is the most important asset they have. I have heard great things about KeePass so if you make that switch good on you. Edit: Added "very seriously" above.

Roritharr 11y ago

The only workable self-hosted solution I found was TeamPass, but i'm nowhere knowledgable about itsec to make an audit. https://github.com/nilsteampassnet/TeamPass https://github.com/nilsteampassnet/TeamPass

Vendan 11y ago
It may have changed recently, but as of about a year ago, a TeamPass installation on a corporate network was my ticket as a pen tester to go from plugging into the network to domain admin in 4 hours. Not the best of signs.

chinathrow 11y ago

"What I am saying is that LastPass adds Javascript payloads to your encrypted vault in cleartext. Javascript code that will be injected and run in every page load in the domain’s context. While this is a legitimate feature, it gives LastPass the possibility of stealing all your credentials." Ouch ouch ouch. How did they think that was a good idea anyway?

VLM 11y ago

Its interesting that the unix world outlook of simple tools doing one thing make this simple. My encryption layer is encfs, my storage and sync layer is dropbox (although I used unison a long time ago) and I don't use the browser interface layer so I hand type passwords. At least this way I never forget any. Oh and for password creation I use pwgen for important stuff (the credit union) and silly names for unimportant stuff (social media) Individually those small simple tools are well optimized and pretty safe. Yet monolithic top to bottom windows style all in one solutions always fail miserably such that it smells impossible to actually implement. Which it might be, for practical, and possibly legal, reasons. This is interesting because its a real world example of what happens if you let the general public be unix sysadmins. It is possible, that just like some knowledge is only for the cognitive elite, some computer automations and features are inherently by the complexity of what they do, only for the computational elite. If this isn't a specific example of something on that borderland, its an interesting topic to think about in general.

dbg31415 11y ago

Fucking depressing. Thanks.

noondip 11y ago

165 sloc of bash + gpg = https://github.com/drduh/pwd.sh/ https://github.com/drduh/pwd.sh/

sfilipov 11y ago

Whenever an article like that appears about a proprietary password manager, I just wonder if there has been any audit on the popular open source ones like KeePass. In fact I've heard that KeePass has some security issues. Is KeePass more secure?