29 ms·

LessPass: sync-less open source password manager

412 points by mgliwka 10y ago

avian 10y ago
I don't know what these are used for, but secret keys generated from current time are easy to guess. You only have to try around 2^24 values if you can estimate installation time within a specific year. https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/blob/master/lesspass.sh#L16 https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/blob/master/lesspass.sh...
- mgliwka 10y ago
  The SECRET_KEY is used by Django, see here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7382149/django-secret-key https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7382149/django-secret-ke... EDIT: I've created a issue on GitHub about this. (https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/43 https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/43)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- lloeki 10y ago
  I always wondered why people resorted to `date(1)` when there's `random(4)`: $ xxd -l 20 -p /dev/random 669d8372d63897e37776d05dc8acccbacf26befc
jiehong 10y ago
Not-so-good good idea? Given that you already have dozens of site with their own passwords, you just can't import your passwords, but you need to change all of them to start using lesspass first. Also, if the way the generation of passwords works changes later (i.e. bug), then the users are stuck with a version, or the bug is never fixed, ever.
- b15h0p 10y ago
  You could just put the Algorithm or the version into the configuration. That would at least allow a gradual migration.
- czechdeveloper 10y ago
  You are right. I made me similar tool. It just made MD5 out of mater password and service name. You suddenly realize how many services have special rules you can't fit in. So for each service, I had to remember master password, which "url" i used (gmail.com or mail.google.com?) and which restrictions apply. Usually they did not allow me so long password. Sometimes I was limited to 16, sometimes 12 chars. After big password leak (heartbleed), I had to setup second master password for all affected service. So, no. No more sync-less state-less password managers for me.
  - arcticfox 10y ago
    Isn't that what the hosted profile is for?
- erikb 10y ago
  There are a lot of reasonable complaints in the comments, but "you need to change your passwords when changing to this service" is actually not one. You want to do that anyway from time to time, and when you are using a new password manager is actually a great time.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    It's also really shocking to see just how many accounts the average person amasses. My KWallet had some 250 entries at peak times.
  - joosters 10y ago
    If you want to change your passwords from time to time, as you say, then this system isn't going to suit you, because it only ever generates one password for each site.
    - 5xman 10y ago
      You could change your master password from time to time and you chould increase the counter (which changes your password) for a given site from time to time.
corobo 10y ago
What happens when the method of creating passwords needs updating, do I then need to visit countless numbers of sites to change the password? I like the idea don't get me wrong, I just can't see all of the downsides right now which will stop me using it. Elephant in the room: Are you going to be sued by lastpass for the name?
- guillaume20100 10y ago
  We are not a danger to LastPass. We'll see in time if it happens. The idea came after using KeePass -> I want to keep less passwords -> lesspass -> lesspass.com is available -> done
HackinOut 10y ago
I wouldn't use a password manager system that doesn't have the ability to change the master password. EDIT: You can't change any password really, without changing all of them (or having a separate master password). Seems unpractical as soon as, for example, site X gets its database hacked.
- mgliwka 10y ago
  Actually, you can. See https://blog.lesspass.com/lesspass-how-it-works-dde742dd18a4#.3lqvm28uu https://blog.lesspass.com/lesspass-how-it-works-dde742dd18a4...
  - HackinOut 10y ago
    That is either by using the "connected version" or loosing the multi devices ability. BTW shouldn't the "connected version" be the one detailed on the home page? Sure sounds more attractive to me.
    - bryanlarsen 10y ago
      Or you have to remember the counter. Since most people just append a counter to their password for those sites that force them to change regularly, it's not really that different. :)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
croon 10y ago
Others have expressed most of them, but issues I see with this is: * Algorithm can't be changed/improved without changing all your passwords. * Your master password can't be changed without changing all your passwords. * You have to remember yourself at what sites you are already registered, and in case of critical bug, you would perhaps need to change password at some services (again remembering which ones they were). With that said, I really like the outside-of-the-box thinking on this.
- lemoniidae 10y ago
  I have written a similar Password manager as an UWP for Windows [0]. It didn't get much attention since i never tried to get some. I could not agree more with the points you mentioned. To solve the last one I added the option to create an encrypted list for the sites. But so you end with an additional password you need to remember because using the same as for the masterkey makes this the only key to access every password. And this is what the system tries to avoid. [0] https://github.com/AndHell/CreatePass https://github.com/AndHell/CreatePass
- joosters 10y ago
  Also, some sites (generally banks) change their login URLs and domains from time to time. With a 'traditional' password manager, I can map it to the old login details with a few clicks. With a stateless system, you're out of luck.
  - croon 10y ago
    Very good point!
  - Ajedi32 10y ago
    Also, some sites use a unified login which is shared between multiple sites owned by the same company. For example, StackOverflow uses an account which is shared across all the various StackExchange-type sites, and Gamepedia requires you to sign in with your "Curse Community Account". (I'm sure there are more examples; those are just the ones off the top of my head.)
  - 10y ago
mgliwka 10y ago
Here a write up on how it works: https://blog.lesspass.com/lesspass-how-it-works-dde742dd18a4#.3lqvm28uu https://blog.lesspass.com/lesspass-how-it-works-dde742dd18a4...
sschueller 10y ago
This one isn't bad either https://keeweb.info/ https://keeweb.info/
- arcticfox 10y ago
  This looks really nice as well, is there a catch? Why would I pay for eg LastPass?
  - r3bl 10y ago
    This is another GUI on top of KeePass' protocol, it's not a completely different password manager. Open source, built on top of Electron (IIRC), and there is no cost of using it.
  - Marc_Bryan 10y ago
    Lastpass is free now for mobile devices! If that is what you were willing to pay for! It syncs seamlessly across all desktop browsers, iOS and Android devices without any issues.
    - arcticfox 10y ago
      Oh! Thanks.
shinigami 10y ago
> PBKDF2 with 8192 iterations Not nearly good enough.
3pt14159 10y ago
Very cool project! One thing though, LessPass sets HSTS headers, but should include the `includeSubDomains` directive and the `preload` directive to stop a first time MITM (for example, when you get a new phone). Once these are done, LessPass should be added to various browser preload lists.
lindner 10y ago
This looks a lot like https://getvau.lt/ https://getvau.lt/
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
daurnimator 10y ago
SuperGenPass is (was?) a similar concept: supergenpass.com
- davidcollantes 10y ago
  Yes, I have used that one for many years. Same features.
- palant 10y ago
  Please don't use that, the password derivation "algorithm" used there is extremely weak. I explained the issue a while ago here: https://palant.de/2016/04/20/security-considerations-for-password-generators https://palant.de/2016/04/20/security-considerations-for-pas... That blog post lists two extensions with hashing algorithm "custom" - that's SuperGenPass.
mrleinad 10y ago
What happens if a site requires you to change passwords regularly and keeps a history of the passwords you've used? Wouldn't you be locked on a single password for each site (or a very limited number of options to force the app to change it)
- askmike 10y ago
  I guess you can increment the password length by one each time. Though you have to keep track of the last used length.
  - fnj 10y ago
    For brain dead sites with rules like "min 6 chars, max 8, mandatory change every 60 days", that won't take you very far.
  - mrleinad 10y ago
    So you're changing remembering 1 password for each site, for remembering a bunch of option configurations for each site. Doesn't look like a win situation for me.
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  From the FAQ: How do I change a password without changing my master password? That’s the purpose of the counter field in the options field set, increment it and you will get a new password.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
fnj 10y ago
When I find stuff like this that uses SHA256, I instantly just tune out. SHA256 is stupid. Use SHA512 or find another line of work. SHA512 is astronomically more secure. Anyone who is using anything less than SHA512 for hashing is an idiot.
- aurelianito 10y ago
  I think my passwords are far less interesting for an attacker than the Bitcoin block chain. And it's integrity is based upon sha256.
- supergreg 10y ago
  We had this conversation when it was md5 vs sha2 and concluded sha2 was good enough. What changed?
- minitech 10y ago
  Anything to back this up? Why is SHA-256 stupid? I’d use truncated SHA-512 for speed on large inputs, maybe, but the extra 256 bits don’t usually add much in terms of security…
- palant 10y ago
  SHA512 is astronomically more secure how exactly? Under which scenarios? Just so you know: SHA1 is problematic because of potential collision attacks. So you should definitely not use SHA1 for signing anything because it might be possible to construct a different document with the same signature. That's it. What does it have to do with password derivation? Nothing at all. Collision attacks are irrelevant, what matters is computational complexity. So if you use PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA1 the only thing that would make your solution less secure is some shortcut allowing to compute a SHA1 hash radically faster without throwing faster hardware at it. And so far nobody found one. Since you seem to like name calling, what do you call somebody making authoritative statements on matters they don't understand? For reference, I am the author of Easy Passwords extension which uses a concept similar to LessPass. And it also uses SHA1 - for technical reasons.
ciorici 10y ago
I've been using a similar tool long time ago: http://angel.net/~nic/passwd.current.html http://angel.net/~nic/passwd.current.html
ch0wn 10y ago
I've used PasswordMaker in the past which uses the same concept but recently moved away from it. Changing passwords is a pain as you now have to remember special parameters for certain pages. Even worse, in case of a compromise of your master password, you're toast. The same is true when losing your password manager database + credentials, but at least you will have a list of all your compromised records which you would have to keep separate in this case. I've moved to KeeWeb since then + CPK for Chrome and Keepass2Android on my phone and couldn't be happier.
romseb 10y ago
I am surprised Stanford PwdHash [0] has not been mentioned yet as an alternative, which has extensions for Chrome, Fx, Safari, Android, iOS, Terminal and other software. [0] https://pwdhash.com/ https://pwdhash.com/
cyphar 10y ago
While the idea sounds alright (and I've seen similar ideas done before), there are a few problems with this system that make me quite cautious about trying it: * In order to handle different password complexities, regeneration of passwords and similar setting, you have to use a "connected" version (read: you have to store the configuration). In addition, the configuration they have includes potentially sensitive information (password length, number of times password was changed, list of websites I use, my username on the site). And currently those profiles are unencrypted. So you in order for it to be useful it's no longer sync-less. As an aside, my bank (foolishly) uses my generated username as a "privileged" piece of information -- which means that I literally could not use this manager for my bank. * You can't change your master password without updating all of your site passwords. This also means you can't import your old passwords without just changing them all. IMO this makes LessPass not a password "manager". It's a password generator. * Also, the profile doesn't appear to contain any configuration details for the PBKDF, which seems like a bad idea (it means that they can never practically update the PBKDF without introducing backwards compatibility in the profile settings). Also not sure why they're using SHA when there are better password hashing algorithms. * Aliases are impossible to implement (without adding more information to the profile), which just makes this impossible to use with SSO systems (I'm not going to remember which of the 5 different hostnames I used to generate a password I use once a year). I've got to admit that I kinda like the symbols shown next to your password to make sure you're using the right master password, but there doesn't seem to be any description how that's generated. My guess is that it's similar to SSH keyart (which then brings up the question how often will collisions happen with only X^3 options, and can you have two passwords result in different orderings of the same tokens). Overall, seems like an okay idea. But I would prefer if someone just offered a nice way to host your KeePass databases (or rather if there was an app that did it). You could probably do it with git and push to GitLab or something, but that is just ugly to do manually.
- 5xman 10y ago
  The login you use with lesspass doesn't need to match your actual login on a web site. In fact, nothing needs to match anything real. You could use any url or alias for the service you want to access ie "Google" and you can use your real login or any other text, it doesn't matter as far as you remember it (You could use 'me' for every site, I don't know why this field is required)
pilif 10y ago
How do you deal with sites whose password requirements don't match the output of LessPass? How do you handle the fact that sites want you to change your password? Yes. There's a counter field, but how do you know what site uses what version of the counter? How do you change the master password without having to change all passwords? Thing is: There's a solution for all these problems: All you have to do is actually generating a random password and store that (in-fact, that's the solution proposed by LessPass to use for these special cases. But if you have storage for the special cases, why not just store the passwords to begin with?) You don't want to sync it because you don't trust the client-side encryption used in all the managers out there? Use a piece of paper to write the passwords down. Or use a device you constantly carry with you as your password store. While there are tons of workarounds for the issues of stateful password managers, there are none for the stateless ones (aside of storing the state somewhere, but if you're doing that, why not just store the password?)
- supersan 10y ago
  I think there is where the connected version can play an important role. From my understanding it stores everything but the password, so that can keep track of password rules, counters, etc per site. I think the biggest issue still is what happens when you change your master password? Because I couldn't find an answer for that. >aside of storing the state somewhere, but if you're doing that, why not just store the password? Because even if the state information is compromised, it is useless to the attacker. On the other hand, if a password is leaked that can be used to access the account.
  - y7 10y ago
    State for password managers is almost always stored encrypted, i.e. in a form useless to the attacker.
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  > But if you have storage for the special cases, why not just store the passwords to begin with? 1. because compromises do not give up the password 2. because storage then becomes optional, it's still usable if it's not installed on the device you're using, as long as you remember the metadata. (or keep trying different combinations until you get it, there aren't that many different combinations as long as you rarely increment a counter).
msl09 10y ago
I started using Nic Wolff's password generator[0] to solve that very problem, but I noticed that the need for connected passwords makes up a large size of the passwords that I needed to use, so I gave up on the idea of "store nothing passwords". The idea of generating always the same password for the same site is also doesn't work, because of database breaches, so in the end I created a program[1] that did all the things I needed. Check the README to know how it works. [0] - http://angel.net/~nic/passwd.current.html http://angel.net/~nic/passwd.current.html [1] - https://github.com/marceloslacerda/password_generator https://github.com/marceloslacerda/password_generator
- majewsky 10y ago
  Looks pretty similar to what I'm using: https://github.com/majewsky/pwget https://github.com/majewsky/pwget Mine doesn't have any provisions for passwords with a specific length or charset. If someone does not like what my pwget generates, I will adjust the password manually and write down the rules in a file that is kept in a private Git repo.
adilparvez 10y ago
It's great people are exploring this problem space, but so far nothing comes close to https://www.passwordstore.org/ https://www.passwordstore.org/ which is just a wrapper around gpg and git. It has Android/iOS clients, as well as GUI clients. On Android I use Password Store + OpenKeychain, the UX with a YubiKey is very smooth. https://fossdroid.com/a/openkeychain.html https://fossdroid.com/a/openkeychain.html https://fossdroid.com/a/password-store.html https://fossdroid.com/a/password-store.html
- omtose 10y ago
  I'm also a user of pass, but the fact that all the metadata is in clear is a big beef for me. How do you solve that, if at all?
  - aban 10y ago
    Fellow pass user here. freepass [0] seems like it could be a potential candidate, somewhere between pass and LessPass, but I haven't tried it out for myself yet. [0]: https://github.com/myfreeweb/freepass https://github.com/myfreeweb/freepass
  - JetSpiegel 10y ago
    You could encrypt the password store folder with another gpg container. That would be your master password.
  - supergreg 10y ago
    Maybe you can put the whole .pass directory inside an encfs directory. Encryption all the way down.
  - adilparvez 10y ago
    You can use a hash of the site appended with a .pass wide pepper as the name of the directory storing credentials for a particular site, then use a wrapper script that hashes its input before passing it to pass. Also full disk encryption.
    - 10y ago
jhasse 10y ago
I've written a native app (in C++ with wxWidgets) with the same principle: https://bixense.com/pwcalculator/ https://bixense.com/pwcalculator/
wyclif 10y ago
A gentle critique: don't use "How it works?" since that is not proper English. "How does it work?" is better.
- zimpenfish 10y ago
  On what grounds is it not "proper English"?
  - andresgottlieb 10y ago
    http://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/17778/how-it-works-vs-how-does-it-work http://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/17778/how-it-works-vs...
- dancek 10y ago
  "How it works" without the question mark is fine, too. The site actually uses "How it works ?" which is a dead giveaway that the author is French. As an ESL speaker myself, I wouldn't nitpick about grammar, though. The language on the site is very good in general, and learning second languages is very difficult. Je sais je ne peux ecriver francais bien. Right?
  - dancek 10y ago
    I guess my comma use is also a dead giveaway of my first language...
  - wyclif 10y ago
    Yes, I should have added that "How it works" sans question mark is proper as well.
marcioaguiar 10y ago
How is this different from having one password for all sites? If I break the master password I gain access to everything.
- jhasse 10y ago
  If the database of a site gets stolen it makes it a little harder to break your master password.
- minitech 10y ago
  If you use one password for all sites: * if password hashes from any site you use leak and they’re weak, you’re compromised everywhere * if any site is or becomes malicious and its operators/hackers read your password, you’re compromised everywhere This approach (maybe not implementation – its hashing is kind of weak) is fine if your master password is strong enough, which it should be.
jasikpark 10y ago
A more developed and mature implementation of a stateless password manager is http://masterpasswordapp.com http://masterpasswordapp.com
- rorygreen 10y ago
  Out of interest, do you actually use this? I saw it recommended on HN before and tried it. I found it has one of the most awful UIs I've ever seen. I found it completely unusable and dropped it immediately. I'm not saying people shouldn't use it if it works for them but I don't think I could honestly recommend it to anybody.
rorygreen 10y ago
I feel like most of the complaints here are about stateless password managers/generators in general. If not being able to change your master password is an issue to you, then this type of password manager is not for you. The cryptographic arguments seem more valid and worth considering if you plan to use this. I was planning to build something very similar to this as I came to the same conclusions as the creator of LessPass, that the existing solutions are not satisfactory for my use case. My current choice in software of this type is Twik (https://github.com/gustavomondron/twik https://github.com/gustavomondron/twik) because it has an Android app available from F-Droid and an extension I can install in Chromium. The browser extension is especially good but not without faults. For daily use I find this adequate but I find myself in situations where I need to access a password outside of a browser or my phone which is a huge pain. Other drawbacks include no ability to change or bump the password to a new one without creating a new profile. Keeping my phone and computer in sync is also slightly annoying as you need to manually copy the UUID (long-ish complicated string) which is used to identify each profile. I think a lot of these issues could be overcome by relatively simple solutions just by applying some sensible design without going all in and trying to be everything at once like LessPass is. If, for example, Twik generated QR codes for its profile keys which you could scan in the mobile app, it would speed things up massively. If it had a compatible CLI interface and a macOS menu bar application, it would be fantastic. I'd also rather not bother with creating an account with another service just to sync my password version numbers and silly password rules that sites implement. The ability to self-host LessPass is nice but do I really need to bother with this? What's wrong with syncing this information in a simply formatted, maybe also encrypted, text file with services I already use such as Dropbox or Google Drive? Also, why is the default password length 12 characters? It's a small gripe but I thought the whole point of using software like this was to enforce good password practices. I think https://getvau.lt/ https://getvau.lt/ gets pretty much everything right other than having to remember the rules of each password every time you generate it which, for me, isn't much better than remembering different strong passwords for multiple sites. I've been hoping for some time that somebody would create a solution that I feel makes sense so I was excited to see this post but unfortunately it seems to have too many drawbacks for me personally to incorporate into my daily life. The open source nature of a lot of these products is very helpful and will hopefully reduce the effort I will have to eventually put into building a solution that gets out of my way.
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laurent123456 10y ago
Same as this one - https://ssl.masterpasswordapp.com/ https://ssl.masterpasswordapp.com/ and also same problem that if you need to change your master password, all the passwords of all your websites becomes invalid. I really don't see how this kind of solution is workable.
wjd2030 10y ago
So what is stopping someone who already knows the username from generating the correct password?
jayeshsalvi 10y ago
Can I change the master password?
nachtigall 10y ago
How is this better/worse than https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/easy-passwords https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/easy-password... which claims that "No web servers involved, the data never leaves your computer."?
Marc_Bryan 10y ago
Lastpass is free now for mobile devices. Enjoy!
sixhobbits 10y ago
I really dislike the copy/marketing of this tool. OK, so it doesn't sync? How does it work? reads whole front page and all features. No sync, but access anywhere? How does it work?? *clicks the "How it works" link and reads another 5 paragraphs of "This is great. It's so simple. It works really really well. You can phone people and they'll tell you how well LessPass works". Finally, after clicking on the link and scrolling past a bullet list and stylised quotation, we get "The trick is to compute passwords rather than generate and store random passwords. LessPass generates unique passwords for websites, email accounts, or anything else based on a master password and information you know." "Next-gen", "Anywhere, anytime", "Manage directly from your browser". These are all super cliched, really cheap phrases that I really dislike. The front page is full of them. If you're marketing a luxury yacht trip to people with more money than sense, then sure you're probably going to get good results by writing like this. But the folk reading about this are going to be pretty technical and I'm sure everyone would appreciate to see something like "We provide a function that generates a memorable password from the site name and your master password" on the front page, above the fold. In terms of entropy, you may as well come up with your own function. Security through obscurity is bad (no one knows the function you use to generate site specific passwords) but it's better than security through less obscurity (use a public function that a bunch of other people are using). You can't get free entropy. If you care about your passwords not being broken when a database of hashes is dumped, you need to use a long, securely generated, random password. Sure, this is better than using the same password everywhere, but it's not really an alternative to something that uses proven cryptography to generate secure unique passwords. Passwords generated using this are only as good as your master password, with some obscurity thrown in.
- michaelmior 10y ago
  If it's open source, how can you hope you achieve security through obscurity?
  - sixhobbits 10y ago
    evil hax0r has database of leaked hashes from shittyonlinewebappyoudidntknowyousignedupfor.com, which includes your email address and a bad hash of your password. They run them through some standard password dictionaries using hashcat and break all of the 'letmein', 'monkey', 'qwerty', '111111' passwords within seconds. Then they run some bigger dictionaries and some nice rule-sets and crack another 50%. Then they start trying to crack the more difficult ones. GPUs come out and some fancy machine learning. Then they do some specialised stuff, like implementing the LessPass open source function to start trying to crack LessPass specific passwords. This is now as difficult to crack as your master password for LessPass, but it's "security through obscurity" because they have to guess that you use LessPass, and will probably only start attacking your password once all the low-hanging fruit is gone, giving you more time to change your password/ delete your affected account, etc.
iKlsR 10y ago
Enpass is my goto, recently recommended it to some people as well and all are happy. I have it on my phone as well as work PC, personal laptop and a linux box. One master password and it's all local, I just use dropbox to sync the encrypted "wallet" so I have my accounts on all my devices. https://www.enpass.io/ https://www.enpass.io/
atemerev 10y ago
OK, fine. This is one thing I can finally use. (I can't use regular storage-based password managers, as I have ADD and I will lose my password file. If it is backed up, I will lose a backup, or I will forget to update it when passwords are changed, or something else. I always screw such things up, this is absolutely inevitable, so I have to prepare. To compensate, my symbolic memory is excellent, so I just chose to memorize all my passwords, as I can't lose my head. But even my memory has limits, and I had to lose some entropy on my passwords to keep them all in my head.) Now, I will get the best of both worlds.
- teach 10y ago
  What's wrong with something like Lastpass?
  - atemerev 10y ago
    Lastpass is something I have no control of. Leaks can happen (already have: https://blog.lastpass.com/2015/06/lastpass-security-notice.html/ https://blog.lastpass.com/2015/06/lastpass-security-notice.h...). More importantly, DDoS can happen, and I will be out of access to everything.
    - blueplanet200 10y ago
      Lastpass stores your password encrypted. If in your threat model you're unwilling to use Lastpass because of the leakability of the master database, you should avoid Lesspass since trying to guess your password on Webstie X given Lastpass database is more/less the same as trying to guess it given you're using Lesspass.
      - atemerev 10y ago
        Like I said before, leakability of master database is not that big concern. DDoS on Lastpass, however, is a very likely scenario, especially in the light of recent high-profile DDoS attacks.
sonofgod 10y ago
Don't use this if you're ever going to type in a password where the screen might be shared -- the constantly-updating "is my password correct" glyphs give away enough information to make it super trivial to decode by eye. PS: the password for the demonstration gif is "passwordpassword"
- guillaume20100 10y ago
  @dragondave on github open an issue https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/48 https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/48. We are working on it.
- spb 10y ago
  This is why I designed the similarly-updating glyphs in surpass (https://stuartpb.github.io/surpass/demo.html https://stuartpb.github.io/surpass/demo.html) to only update after a half-second delay when masked.
mikegerwitz 10y ago
See also gnu-pw-mgr (CLI): https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-pw-mgr https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-pw-mgr It generates passwords based on a secret key ("seed") and memorized transformations to URLs. You can adapt that to use a master password, if you so desire, by using a password as a base for such a transformation, but that's not built in.
Nux 10y ago
Nice idea and willing to try it, but.. "The requirement for self-hosting is to have docker and docker-compose installed on your machine." Fsck that. If I will trust this with my passwords, I need to know how to _really_ install it. I can't trust you if all you have to offer is a steaming pile of docker or your idea of how I should run my systems.
- fapjacks 10y ago
  If you knew anything about the applications you disparage, you would know how to take a Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml file and determine exactly how to install it on your system. Since that's what they do.
  - Nux 10y ago
    Of course that I know how to do that. What bothers me is the first approach they take.
tim333 10y ago
How it works roughly: https://blog.lesspass.com/lesspass-how-it-works-dde742dd18a4#.wwoj952kz https://blog.lesspass.com/lesspass-how-it-works-dde742dd18a4... It seems they take info from the site (its name?) plus your master password and hash them - "LessPass uses PBKDF2 with 8192 iterations and a hash function sha-256." I guess they then produce something of the required length and characters from the hash. Guess it's ok till someone finds your master password.
Ruphin 10y ago
Hi Guillaume, Your master password is 'passwordpassword'. 10 points if you know how I figured that out :)
- PuffinBlue 10y ago
  An issue was raised for this over on GitHub[1] after it was pointed out by others. Quite an interesting example of how easy it is to slip up and make something trivially crackable. [1] https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/48 https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/48
JulianMorrison 10y ago
What this seems to be, in essence: password = HMAC(key, website). Why this is bad, compared to an encrypted on-disk key store: 1. A password is now ciphertext, not a block of line noise. Every time you transmit it, you are giving away potential clues of use to an attacker. 2. The search space for possible passwords is bounded if you know the website. You are subject to key guessing attacks. If your key is short, pure serial guessing will break it fast. 3. They don't need any access to you or your stuff, to guess a key. They don't even need access to the server, it can be guessed on an unrelated machine. You don't have the opportunity to detect a break-in and neither does your bank, etc. 4. You only have one password for all the sites, really, underneath, and it's your secret key. If it's broken, it's now a skeleton-key and your digital ass is theirs.
- obi1kenobi 10y ago
  I completely agree. What makes all of it even worse is that they only use 8192 iterations of PBKDF2, based on their blog post [1]. To counter GPU-based password cracking, 100,000+ iterations are needed as of 5 years ago [2]. [1] https://blog.lesspass.com/lesspass-how-it-works-dde742dd18a4 https://blog.lesspass.com/lesspass-how-it-works-dde742dd18a4 [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6054082/recommended-of-iterations-when-using-pbkdf2-sha256 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6054082/recommended-of-it...
  - problems 10y ago
    Yeah, going to Scrypt or Argon2 would mitigate a lot of the GPU-based concerns while still offering reasonable in-browser performance.
    - homakov 10y ago
      Scrypt seems to be performing better in the browser because of 32 bit operations. Argon2 in browser was slow in my tests.
      - cyphar 10y ago
shawnzvinis 10y ago
Thanks for building and posting this! I regularly think about being "locked out" of everything if I were to loose all my devices (e.g. get robbed). I hope this product will evolve to solve some of the concerns people have raised above.
guillaume20100 10y ago
I'm the creator of LessPass. We did not expect as many visits on our website. Thank you. We are working on: * encrypt password profiles client side. * help user change their master passwords (https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/36 https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/36) * mobile version(https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/6 https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/6) Change his master password seems to be the biggest problem for many of you. We will address this problem as a priority.
- SimplGy 10y ago
  I want to start using this, but I'm concerned what happens when a service changes their domain. When the domain changes, even subtly like from api.foo.com to www.foo.com, it will break my ability to access the site. If I do not remember the previous URL, I will not be able to recover it. More details in this github issue comment: https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/45#issuecomment-261335020 https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/45#issuecomment-... Has this been a real-life concern for you while you've used the tool?
- palant 10y ago
  I was quite surprised to see your extension, it is very similar to my Easy Passwords extension in both concept and design. I've had a brief look at the source code and I guess that it was a completely unrelated development after all? Please increase the number of iterations, PBKDF2 with 8192 iterations is a very bad idea in year 2016. I would consider 100k iteration the lower limit, my Easy Passwords extension uses 256k. For reference, I described the threat scenario here: https://palant.de/2016/04/20/security-considerations-for-password-generators https://palant.de/2016/04/20/security-considerations-for-pas... Note that LastPass isn't a good example when it comes to security-relevant decisions. If you are interested, I published a lengthy writeup under https://security.stackexchange.com/a/137307/4778 https://security.stackexchange.com/a/137307/4778.
  - guillaume20100 10y ago
    Hi Palant, I found your app in the comment today. So yes, LessPass was developed it independently. And yes we are working in a way to change the number of rounds of PBKDF2. https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/38 https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/38 API already evolve (https://github.com/lesspass/core/commit/70bebd5e5bcd0c9a32ac6aee05ea4586f0a8773a https://github.com/lesspass/core/commit/70bebd5e5bcd0c9a32ac...), we are updating the user interface.
mehdix 10y ago
I use [pass](https://www.passwordstore.org/ https://www.passwordstore.org/) which is an open source command line password manager. It uses gpg to encrypt passwords which in turn is setup to use a hardware key with its own password. The downside is the metadata which is exposed in file system tree, however the data is stored on a dm-crypted disk. Difficult to setup but much more secure.
libeclipse 10y ago
I made something similar to this: https://github.com/libeclipse/visionary https://github.com/libeclipse/visionary Works by using a master password and a keyword to generate a seed, then applies various deterministic algorithms to generate multiple passwords.
leshow 10y ago
I did a quick over-look of the information on the site, but it looks to me that this is a pretty bad 'password manager' it looks like anyone can try to brute force your password based on the login/site combo. can someone tell me why i'm wrong here?
dexterdog 10y ago
Why do none of the password managers integrate a decent xkcd password option? I like having a complex password, but God forbid I have to ever read it from my phone and type it somewhere else. xkcd is easy. Use a word dictionary pick a few words and delimit them with special characters. Mix the case as an option, too.
hogrammer 10y ago
See also pwdhash.com
rahvee 10y ago
If you re-generate the password for each site, rather than sync, it means (1) you can't change your password on that site, (2) if any site puts in the effort to brute-force guess your password, they will have access to all the sites you visit. This is not a good idea.
dchest 10y ago
Obligatory post about password generators: http://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/5691/291 http://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/5691/291
s9ix 10y ago
Wouldn't enabling two-factor on the primary login and naming sites whatever you want solve most gripes with this (in the comments here)? i.e. I name hacker news hn or hack, as opposed to news.ycombinator.com - one more thing to guess for an attacker.
SippinLean 10y ago
Maybe make the difference between your name and LastPass more than 2 letters?
fps 10y ago
We need to re-think passwords. Password re-use is a big problem for technical and non-technical users alike, because managing a unique generated password between devices is hard. Dealing with password managers and syncing password lists back and forth is super frustrating to users. None of the existing tools work quickly and easily on all the different devices a user could be using, so at some point everyone that uses a password manager is going to be stuck fighting their password manager to log into a website. The user will likely perform a password reset, which will send an email that allows the user to bypass the password entirely. Why not provide people with a quick and easy "login by email", since this fallback is almost always available anyway? Slack does this https://auth0.com/blog/how-to-implement-slack-like-login-on-ios-with-auth0/ https://auth0.com/blog/how-to-implement-slack-like-login-on-... and allows people to have accounts with no password memorization. You're not making the login any less secure - any attacker with access to a user's email can almost always perform a password reset anyway.
- whyever 10y ago
  > Why not provide people with a quick and easy "login by email", since this fallback is almost always available anyway? There was Mozilla's Persona (which was shut down a few days ago). Now there is this: https://portier.github.io/ https://portier.github.io/
ekiru 10y ago
The _prettyPrint [1] and _getPasswordTemplate [2] functions they use to get from the HMAC to the actual password seem to have a lot of issues: - _prettyPrint calls into _getPasswordChar which will then take the character code modulo the length of the array of possible characters [3], which is usually going to be biased if the character code is not uniformly distributed between 0 (inclusive) and a multiple of the length (exclusive). - It's even worse because the input to _prettyPrint is the HMAC encoded as a hexadecimal string. The impact of this depends on the size of the possible character array, but in several cases, some of the options can never be chosen and others will be chosen twice as often as others that can be chosen. - Using the hex encoding also drastically reduces the number of possibilities for a given length even if that input was then used in a less flawed fashion. - _getPasswordTemplate appears to treat a password with lowercase/uppercase letters as a series of alternating vowels and consonants (by appending 'vc' or 'VC' to the password template). - It also generally seems to define "password containing X and Y char types" as "password containing X char type, then Y char type, then X, then Y, and so on". [1]: https://github.com/lesspass/core/blob/master/lib/index.js#L82 https://github.com/lesspass/core/blob/master/lib/index.js#L8... [2]: https://github.com/lesspass/core/blob/master/lib/index.js#L66 https://github.com/lesspass/core/blob/master/lib/index.js#L6... [3]: https://github.com/lesspass/core/blob/master/lib/index.js#L117 https://github.com/lesspass/core/blob/master/lib/index.js#L1...
redpanda_ua 10y ago
Is this better than this: https://ssl.masterpasswordapp.com/ https://ssl.masterpasswordapp.com/ ?
cchubitunes 10y ago
At last, a simple software project a beginner can understand.
vrikis 10y ago
I used to use SuperGenPass[1] to do exactly this, but what you'll soon find is that every website has slightly different password rules, so you'll have to start memorizing unique settings for each site (i.e. website X can't have certain chars, website Y can't be longer than 12 chars, etc...). Then you run into the issue of multiple things you need to remember, such as secret answers for various questions, birthdays that you may lie about, etc... Much easier to just use a vault to store all this. [1] https://chriszarate.github.io/supergenpass/mobile/ https://chriszarate.github.io/supergenpass/mobile/
deleted 10y ago
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nicwolff 10y ago
I may be the inventor of in-browser hash-based password generation – at any rate, most of the early variants like SuperGenPass [1] credit mine [2] as the original. And I still use it for low-value sites – but I let iCloud Keychain generate, store, and sync passwords for e-commerce sites and e-mail services, for all the reasons mentioned by others here. [1] https://github.com/chriszarate/supergenpass/wiki/FAQ https://github.com/chriszarate/supergenpass/wiki/FAQ [2] http://angel.net/~nic/passwd.current.html http://angel.net/~nic/passwd.current.html
- bascule 10y ago
  Does your work predate Stanford PwdHash? https://crypto.stanford.edu/PwdHash/ https://crypto.stanford.edu/PwdHash/
  - nicwolff 10y ago
    Maybe! archive.org's oldest capture of my page [0] is from 22 Dec 03, and doesn't have anything for Stanford's until 9 Apr 04 [1]. But I don't think they got the idea from me, since the first links to my page from blogs and aggregators came in Sep 04 after I added the bookmarklet [2]. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20031222201145/http://angel.net/~nic/passwd.html https://web.archive.org/web/20031222201145/http://angel.net/... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040507195550/http://crypto.stanford.edu/PwdHash/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040507195550/http://crypto.sta... [2] http://jonudell.net/udell/2004-09-07-nic-wolffs-single-signon-bookmarklet.html http://jonudell.net/udell/2004-09-07-nic-wolffs-single-signo...
mihaifm 10y ago
Does anyone know a good password manager that uses touch id, on the iphone?
hellofunk 10y ago
One issue with this is that URLs for sites can, and in my experience, often do, change, while logins remain the same. A password that uses the URL/site itself may no longer work unless you can remember the old site. That's a headache. I used to have my own mental model of generating a password based on a URL, and it eventually failed several times over because of this issue.
leepowers 10y ago
Aside from the security concerns already noted I have two major questions: 1) How do I change my master password? It appears that all generated passwords would change as well. Even master passwords should be expirable and changeable. 2) I don't just use a password manager to manage passwords. I use it to manage _credentials_. I have a ton of credentials, so I need something that will remember the _usernames_ for me as well. Otherwise I don't just have to memorize the master password - I also have to memorize the usernames for the hundreds of different logins I'm managing. That's a non-starter.
deleted 10y ago
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stcredzero 10y ago
I wish someone would make a sync-friendly open source password manager. Something like KeePass, but with fewer features, user initiated auto-fill, has a client on just about all platforms, and is designed ground-up to live on a file sync service like Dropbox or Google Drive.
chiefalchemist 10y ago
This only confirms one thing: How we're doing account security is inadequate at best. Perhaps LessPass comes up short, but that's more a symptom of the broader problem than it is a mistake on the part of LessPass and its ilk.
trungonnews 10y ago
what happens if someone figured out your master password?
lsrom 10y ago
I wrote a short blogpost about LessPass, it's security and what should be done in near future. You can find it here: http://lsrom.cz/blog/2016/11/08/lesspass_why_holding_back_gets_you_nowhere.html http://lsrom.cz/blog/2016/11/08/lesspass_why_holding_back_ge...
arantius 10y ago
I did roughly the same thing twelve years ago, with even less security built in (hey, I was young(er)): https://bookmarklets.arantius.com/password+maker+bookmarklet https://bookmarklets.arantius.com/password+maker+bookmarklet I did not market it so heavily. It has the same problems, most importantly rotation. As soon as you want to rotate one site's password the only option is to change the "master" password, but now you need to remember which site uses which master password, and your utility is gone. The random site requirements, as mentioned, is also a big deal.
viralpoetry 10y ago
I have created Alzheimer Password Manager on the same ideas as this one. I believe the better idea is to use also user specific salt per browser. In that case, the passwords are more unique, and the threat model changes dramatically. Current Threat Model: * No one with an access to the PC with installed extension should be able to authenticate without knowing the correct passphrase. * The same passphrase used in two different web browsers should produce two different passwords (cryptographic salt will solve this problem). * If an attacker obtains password for some websites, she should not be able to derive passwords for another websites using that knowledge. * Attacker should not be able to brute force master passphrase from the salt and knowledge of one password (PBKDF with lots of iterations). * it provides protection against basic keyloggers (but they can read our salt from the memory / file...) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alzheimer-password-genera/emclcafdgdeodlhpenmejdapecfgenof https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alzheimer-password... https://github.com/viralpoetry/password-generator https://github.com/viralpoetry/password-generator

412 points by mgliwka 10y ago

avian 10y ago

I don't know what these are used for, but secret keys generated from current time are easy to guess. You only have to try around 2^24 values if you can estimate installation time within a specific year. https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/blob/master/lesspass.sh#L16 https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/blob/master/lesspass.sh...

mgliwka 10y ago
The SECRET_KEY is used by Django, see here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7382149/django-secret-key https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7382149/django-secret-ke... EDIT: I've created a issue on GitHub about this. (https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/43 https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/43)
- deleted 10y ago
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lloeki 10y ago
I always wondered why people resorted to `date(1)` when there's `random(4)`: $ xxd -l 20 -p /dev/random 669d8372d63897e37776d05dc8acccbacf26befc

jiehong 10y ago

Not-so-good good idea? Given that you already have dozens of site with their own passwords, you just can't import your passwords, but you need to change all of them to start using lesspass first. Also, if the way the generation of passwords works changes later (i.e. bug), then the users are stuck with a version, or the bug is never fixed, ever.

b15h0p 10y ago
You could just put the Algorithm or the version into the configuration. That would at least allow a gradual migration.
czechdeveloper 10y ago
You are right. I made me similar tool. It just made MD5 out of mater password and service name. You suddenly realize how many services have special rules you can't fit in. So for each service, I had to remember master password, which "url" i used (gmail.com or mail.google.com?) and which restrictions apply. Usually they did not allow me so long password. Sometimes I was limited to 16, sometimes 12 chars. After big password leak (heartbleed), I had to setup second master password for all affected service. So, no. No more sync-less state-less password managers for me.
- arcticfox 10y ago
  Isn't that what the hosted profile is for?
erikb 10y ago
There are a lot of reasonable complaints in the comments, but "you need to change your passwords when changing to this service" is actually not one. You want to do that anyway from time to time, and when you are using a new password manager is actually a great time.
- majewsky 10y ago
  It's also really shocking to see just how many accounts the average person amasses. My KWallet had some 250 entries at peak times.
- joosters 10y ago
  If you want to change your passwords from time to time, as you say, then this system isn't going to suit you, because it only ever generates one password for each site.
  - 5xman 10y ago
    You could change your master password from time to time and you chould increase the counter (which changes your password) for a given site from time to time.

corobo 10y ago

What happens when the method of creating passwords needs updating, do I then need to visit countless numbers of sites to change the password? I like the idea don't get me wrong, I just can't see all of the downsides right now which will stop me using it. Elephant in the room: Are you going to be sued by lastpass for the name?

guillaume20100 10y ago
We are not a danger to LastPass. We'll see in time if it happens. The idea came after using KeePass -> I want to keep less passwords -> lesspass -> lesspass.com is available -> done

HackinOut 10y ago

I wouldn't use a password manager system that doesn't have the ability to change the master password. EDIT: You can't change any password really, without changing all of them (or having a separate master password). Seems unpractical as soon as, for example, site X gets its database hacked.

mgliwka 10y ago
Actually, you can. See https://blog.lesspass.com/lesspass-how-it-works-dde742dd18a4#.3lqvm28uu https://blog.lesspass.com/lesspass-how-it-works-dde742dd18a4...
- HackinOut 10y ago
  That is either by using the "connected version" or loosing the multi devices ability. BTW shouldn't the "connected version" be the one detailed on the home page? Sure sounds more attractive to me.
  - bryanlarsen 10y ago
    Or you have to remember the counter. Since most people just append a counter to their password for those sites that force them to change regularly, it's not really that different. :)
deleted 10y ago
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croon 10y ago

Others have expressed most of them, but issues I see with this is: * Algorithm can't be changed/improved without changing all your passwords. * Your master password can't be changed without changing all your passwords. * You have to remember yourself at what sites you are already registered, and in case of critical bug, you would perhaps need to change password at some services (again remembering which ones they were). With that said, I really like the outside-of-the-box thinking on this.

lemoniidae 10y ago
I have written a similar Password manager as an UWP for Windows [0]. It didn't get much attention since i never tried to get some. I could not agree more with the points you mentioned. To solve the last one I added the option to create an encrypted list for the sites. But so you end with an additional password you need to remember because using the same as for the masterkey makes this the only key to access every password. And this is what the system tries to avoid. [0] https://github.com/AndHell/CreatePass https://github.com/AndHell/CreatePass
joosters 10y ago
Also, some sites (generally banks) change their login URLs and domains from time to time. With a 'traditional' password manager, I can map it to the old login details with a few clicks. With a stateless system, you're out of luck.
- croon 10y ago
  Very good point!
- Ajedi32 10y ago
  Also, some sites use a unified login which is shared between multiple sites owned by the same company. For example, StackOverflow uses an account which is shared across all the various StackExchange-type sites, and Gamepedia requires you to sign in with your "Curse Community Account". (I'm sure there are more examples; those are just the ones off the top of my head.)
- 10y ago

mgliwka 10y ago

Here a write up on how it works: https://blog.lesspass.com/lesspass-how-it-works-dde742dd18a4#.3lqvm28uu https://blog.lesspass.com/lesspass-how-it-works-dde742dd18a4...

sschueller 10y ago

This one isn't bad either https://keeweb.info/ https://keeweb.info/

arcticfox 10y ago
This looks really nice as well, is there a catch? Why would I pay for eg LastPass?
- r3bl 10y ago
  This is another GUI on top of KeePass' protocol, it's not a completely different password manager. Open source, built on top of Electron (IIRC), and there is no cost of using it.
- Marc_Bryan 10y ago
  Lastpass is free now for mobile devices! If that is what you were willing to pay for! It syncs seamlessly across all desktop browsers, iOS and Android devices without any issues.
  - arcticfox 10y ago
    Oh! Thanks.

shinigami 10y ago

> PBKDF2 with 8192 iterations Not nearly good enough.

3pt14159 10y ago

Very cool project! One thing though, LessPass sets HSTS headers, but should include the `includeSubDomains` directive and the `preload` directive to stop a first time MITM (for example, when you get a new phone). Once these are done, LessPass should be added to various browser preload lists.

lindner 10y ago

This looks a lot like https://getvau.lt/ https://getvau.lt/

deleted 10y ago
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daurnimator 10y ago

SuperGenPass is (was?) a similar concept: supergenpass.com

davidcollantes 10y ago
Yes, I have used that one for many years. Same features.
palant 10y ago
Please don't use that, the password derivation "algorithm" used there is extremely weak. I explained the issue a while ago here: https://palant.de/2016/04/20/security-considerations-for-password-generators https://palant.de/2016/04/20/security-considerations-for-pas... That blog post lists two extensions with hashing algorithm "custom" - that's SuperGenPass.

mrleinad 10y ago

What happens if a site requires you to change passwords regularly and keeps a history of the passwords you've used? Wouldn't you be locked on a single password for each site (or a very limited number of options to force the app to change it)

askmike 10y ago
I guess you can increment the password length by one each time. Though you have to keep track of the last used length.
- fnj 10y ago
  For brain dead sites with rules like "min 6 chars, max 8, mandatory change every 60 days", that won't take you very far.
- mrleinad 10y ago
  So you're changing remembering 1 password for each site, for remembering a bunch of option configurations for each site. Doesn't look like a win situation for me.
bryanlarsen 10y ago
From the FAQ: How do I change a password without changing my master password? That’s the purpose of the counter field in the options field set, increment it and you will get a new password.

deleted 10y ago

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fnj 10y ago

When I find stuff like this that uses SHA256, I instantly just tune out. SHA256 is stupid. Use SHA512 or find another line of work. SHA512 is astronomically more secure. Anyone who is using anything less than SHA512 for hashing is an idiot.

aurelianito 10y ago
I think my passwords are far less interesting for an attacker than the Bitcoin block chain. And it's integrity is based upon sha256.
supergreg 10y ago
We had this conversation when it was md5 vs sha2 and concluded sha2 was good enough. What changed?
minitech 10y ago
Anything to back this up? Why is SHA-256 stupid? I’d use truncated SHA-512 for speed on large inputs, maybe, but the extra 256 bits don’t usually add much in terms of security…
palant 10y ago
SHA512 is astronomically more secure how exactly? Under which scenarios? Just so you know: SHA1 is problematic because of potential collision attacks. So you should definitely not use SHA1 for signing anything because it might be possible to construct a different document with the same signature. That's it. What does it have to do with password derivation? Nothing at all. Collision attacks are irrelevant, what matters is computational complexity. So if you use PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA1 the only thing that would make your solution less secure is some shortcut allowing to compute a SHA1 hash radically faster without throwing faster hardware at it. And so far nobody found one. Since you seem to like name calling, what do you call somebody making authoritative statements on matters they don't understand? For reference, I am the author of Easy Passwords extension which uses a concept similar to LessPass. And it also uses SHA1 - for technical reasons.

ciorici 10y ago

I've been using a similar tool long time ago: http://angel.net/~nic/passwd.current.html http://angel.net/~nic/passwd.current.html

ch0wn 10y ago

I've used PasswordMaker in the past which uses the same concept but recently moved away from it. Changing passwords is a pain as you now have to remember special parameters for certain pages. Even worse, in case of a compromise of your master password, you're toast. The same is true when losing your password manager database + credentials, but at least you will have a list of all your compromised records which you would have to keep separate in this case. I've moved to KeeWeb since then + CPK for Chrome and Keepass2Android on my phone and couldn't be happier.

romseb 10y ago

I am surprised Stanford PwdHash [0] has not been mentioned yet as an alternative, which has extensions for Chrome, Fx, Safari, Android, iOS, Terminal and other software. [0] https://pwdhash.com/ https://pwdhash.com/

cyphar 10y ago

While the idea sounds alright (and I've seen similar ideas done before), there are a few problems with this system that make me quite cautious about trying it: * In order to handle different password complexities, regeneration of passwords and similar setting, you have to use a "connected" version (read: you have to store the configuration). In addition, the configuration they have includes potentially sensitive information (password length, number of times password was changed, list of websites I use, my username on the site). And currently those profiles are unencrypted. So you in order for it to be useful it's no longer sync-less. As an aside, my bank (foolishly) uses my generated username as a "privileged" piece of information -- which means that I literally could not use this manager for my bank. * You can't change your master password without updating all of your site passwords. This also means you can't import your old passwords without just changing them all. IMO this makes LessPass not a password "manager". It's a password generator. * Also, the profile doesn't appear to contain any configuration details for the PBKDF, which seems like a bad idea (it means that they can never practically update the PBKDF without introducing backwards compatibility in the profile settings). Also not sure why they're using SHA when there are better password hashing algorithms. * Aliases are impossible to implement (without adding more information to the profile), which just makes this impossible to use with SSO systems (I'm not going to remember which of the 5 different hostnames I used to generate a password I use once a year). I've got to admit that I kinda like the symbols shown next to your password to make sure you're using the right master password, but there doesn't seem to be any description how that's generated. My guess is that it's similar to SSH keyart (which then brings up the question how often will collisions happen with only X^3 options, and can you have two passwords result in different orderings of the same tokens). Overall, seems like an okay idea. But I would prefer if someone just offered a nice way to host your KeePass databases (or rather if there was an app that did it). You could probably do it with git and push to GitLab or something, but that is just ugly to do manually.

5xman 10y ago
The login you use with lesspass doesn't need to match your actual login on a web site. In fact, nothing needs to match anything real. You could use any url or alias for the service you want to access ie "Google" and you can use your real login or any other text, it doesn't matter as far as you remember it (You could use 'me' for every site, I don't know why this field is required)

pilif 10y ago

How do you deal with sites whose password requirements don't match the output of LessPass? How do you handle the fact that sites want you to change your password? Yes. There's a counter field, but how do you know what site uses what version of the counter? How do you change the master password without having to change all passwords? Thing is: There's a solution for all these problems: All you have to do is actually generating a random password and store that (in-fact, that's the solution proposed by LessPass to use for these special cases. But if you have storage for the special cases, why not just store the passwords to begin with?) You don't want to sync it because you don't trust the client-side encryption used in all the managers out there? Use a piece of paper to write the passwords down. Or use a device you constantly carry with you as your password store. While there are tons of workarounds for the issues of stateful password managers, there are none for the stateless ones (aside of storing the state somewhere, but if you're doing that, why not just store the password?)

supersan 10y ago
I think there is where the connected version can play an important role. From my understanding it stores everything but the password, so that can keep track of password rules, counters, etc per site. I think the biggest issue still is what happens when you change your master password? Because I couldn't find an answer for that. >aside of storing the state somewhere, but if you're doing that, why not just store the password? Because even if the state information is compromised, it is useless to the attacker. On the other hand, if a password is leaked that can be used to access the account.
- y7 10y ago
  State for password managers is almost always stored encrypted, i.e. in a form useless to the attacker.
bryanlarsen 10y ago
> But if you have storage for the special cases, why not just store the passwords to begin with? 1. because compromises do not give up the password 2. because storage then becomes optional, it's still usable if it's not installed on the device you're using, as long as you remember the metadata. (or keep trying different combinations until you get it, there aren't that many different combinations as long as you rarely increment a counter).

msl09 10y ago

I started using Nic Wolff's password generator[0] to solve that very problem, but I noticed that the need for connected passwords makes up a large size of the passwords that I needed to use, so I gave up on the idea of "store nothing passwords". The idea of generating always the same password for the same site is also doesn't work, because of database breaches, so in the end I created a program[1] that did all the things I needed. Check the README to know how it works. [0] - http://angel.net/~nic/passwd.current.html http://angel.net/~nic/passwd.current.html [1] - https://github.com/marceloslacerda/password_generator https://github.com/marceloslacerda/password_generator

majewsky 10y ago
Looks pretty similar to what I'm using: https://github.com/majewsky/pwget https://github.com/majewsky/pwget Mine doesn't have any provisions for passwords with a specific length or charset. If someone does not like what my pwget generates, I will adjust the password manually and write down the rules in a file that is kept in a private Git repo.

adilparvez 10y ago

It's great people are exploring this problem space, but so far nothing comes close to https://www.passwordstore.org/ https://www.passwordstore.org/ which is just a wrapper around gpg and git. It has Android/iOS clients, as well as GUI clients. On Android I use Password Store + OpenKeychain, the UX with a YubiKey is very smooth. https://fossdroid.com/a/openkeychain.html https://fossdroid.com/a/openkeychain.html https://fossdroid.com/a/password-store.html https://fossdroid.com/a/password-store.html

omtose 10y ago
I'm also a user of pass, but the fact that all the metadata is in clear is a big beef for me. How do you solve that, if at all?
- aban 10y ago
  Fellow pass user here. freepass [0] seems like it could be a potential candidate, somewhere between pass and LessPass, but I haven't tried it out for myself yet. [0]: https://github.com/myfreeweb/freepass https://github.com/myfreeweb/freepass
- JetSpiegel 10y ago
  You could encrypt the password store folder with another gpg container. That would be your master password.
- supergreg 10y ago
  Maybe you can put the whole .pass directory inside an encfs directory. Encryption all the way down.
- adilparvez 10y ago
  You can use a hash of the site appended with a .pass wide pepper as the name of the directory storing credentials for a particular site, then use a wrapper script that hashes its input before passing it to pass. Also full disk encryption.
  - 10y ago

jhasse 10y ago

I've written a native app (in C++ with wxWidgets) with the same principle: https://bixense.com/pwcalculator/ https://bixense.com/pwcalculator/

wyclif 10y ago

A gentle critique: don't use "How it works?" since that is not proper English. "How does it work?" is better.

zimpenfish 10y ago
On what grounds is it not "proper English"?
- andresgottlieb 10y ago
  http://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/17778/how-it-works-vs-how-does-it-work http://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/17778/how-it-works-vs...
dancek 10y ago
"How it works" without the question mark is fine, too. The site actually uses "How it works ?" which is a dead giveaway that the author is French. As an ESL speaker myself, I wouldn't nitpick about grammar, though. The language on the site is very good in general, and learning second languages is very difficult. Je sais je ne peux ecriver francais bien. Right?
- dancek 10y ago
  I guess my comma use is also a dead giveaway of my first language...
- wyclif 10y ago
  Yes, I should have added that "How it works" sans question mark is proper as well.

marcioaguiar 10y ago

How is this different from having one password for all sites? If I break the master password I gain access to everything.

jhasse 10y ago
If the database of a site gets stolen it makes it a little harder to break your master password.
minitech 10y ago
If you use one password for all sites: * if password hashes from any site you use leak and they’re weak, you’re compromised everywhere * if any site is or becomes malicious and its operators/hackers read your password, you’re compromised everywhere This approach (maybe not implementation – its hashing is kind of weak) is fine if your master password is strong enough, which it should be.

jasikpark 10y ago

A more developed and mature implementation of a stateless password manager is http://masterpasswordapp.com http://masterpasswordapp.com

rorygreen 10y ago
Out of interest, do you actually use this? I saw it recommended on HN before and tried it. I found it has one of the most awful UIs I've ever seen. I found it completely unusable and dropped it immediately. I'm not saying people shouldn't use it if it works for them but I don't think I could honestly recommend it to anybody.

rorygreen 10y ago

I feel like most of the complaints here are about stateless password managers/generators in general. If not being able to change your master password is an issue to you, then this type of password manager is not for you. The cryptographic arguments seem more valid and worth considering if you plan to use this. I was planning to build something very similar to this as I came to the same conclusions as the creator of LessPass, that the existing solutions are not satisfactory for my use case. My current choice in software of this type is Twik (https://github.com/gustavomondron/twik https://github.com/gustavomondron/twik) because it has an Android app available from F-Droid and an extension I can install in Chromium. The browser extension is especially good but not without faults. For daily use I find this adequate but I find myself in situations where I need to access a password outside of a browser or my phone which is a huge pain. Other drawbacks include no ability to change or bump the password to a new one without creating a new profile. Keeping my phone and computer in sync is also slightly annoying as you need to manually copy the UUID (long-ish complicated string) which is used to identify each profile. I think a lot of these issues could be overcome by relatively simple solutions just by applying some sensible design without going all in and trying to be everything at once like LessPass is. If, for example, Twik generated QR codes for its profile keys which you could scan in the mobile app, it would speed things up massively. If it had a compatible CLI interface and a macOS menu bar application, it would be fantastic. I'd also rather not bother with creating an account with another service just to sync my password version numbers and silly password rules that sites implement. The ability to self-host LessPass is nice but do I really need to bother with this? What's wrong with syncing this information in a simply formatted, maybe also encrypted, text file with services I already use such as Dropbox or Google Drive? Also, why is the default password length 12 characters? It's a small gripe but I thought the whole point of using software like this was to enforce good password practices. I think https://getvau.lt/ https://getvau.lt/ gets pretty much everything right other than having to remember the rules of each password every time you generate it which, for me, isn't much better than remembering different strong passwords for multiple sites. I've been hoping for some time that somebody would create a solution that I feel makes sense so I was excited to see this post but unfortunately it seems to have too many drawbacks for me personally to incorporate into my daily life. The open source nature of a lot of these products is very helpful and will hopefully reduce the effort I will have to eventually put into building a solution that gets out of my way.

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laurent123456 10y ago

Same as this one - https://ssl.masterpasswordapp.com/ https://ssl.masterpasswordapp.com/ and also same problem that if you need to change your master password, all the passwords of all your websites becomes invalid. I really don't see how this kind of solution is workable.

wjd2030 10y ago

So what is stopping someone who already knows the username from generating the correct password?

jayeshsalvi 10y ago

Can I change the master password?

nachtigall 10y ago

How is this better/worse than https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/easy-passwords https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/easy-password... which claims that "No web servers involved, the data never leaves your computer."?

Marc_Bryan 10y ago

Lastpass is free now for mobile devices. Enjoy!

sixhobbits 10y ago

I really dislike the copy/marketing of this tool. OK, so it doesn't sync? How does it work? reads whole front page and all features. No sync, but access anywhere? How does it work?? *clicks the "How it works" link and reads another 5 paragraphs of "This is great. It's so simple. It works really really well. You can phone people and they'll tell you how well LessPass works". Finally, after clicking on the link and scrolling past a bullet list and stylised quotation, we get "The trick is to compute passwords rather than generate and store random passwords. LessPass generates unique passwords for websites, email accounts, or anything else based on a master password and information you know." "Next-gen", "Anywhere, anytime", "Manage directly from your browser". These are all super cliched, really cheap phrases that I really dislike. The front page is full of them. If you're marketing a luxury yacht trip to people with more money than sense, then sure you're probably going to get good results by writing like this. But the folk reading about this are going to be pretty technical and I'm sure everyone would appreciate to see something like "We provide a function that generates a memorable password from the site name and your master password" on the front page, above the fold. In terms of entropy, you may as well come up with your own function. Security through obscurity is bad (no one knows the function you use to generate site specific passwords) but it's better than security through less obscurity (use a public function that a bunch of other people are using). You can't get free entropy. If you care about your passwords not being broken when a database of hashes is dumped, you need to use a long, securely generated, random password. Sure, this is better than using the same password everywhere, but it's not really an alternative to something that uses proven cryptography to generate secure unique passwords. Passwords generated using this are only as good as your master password, with some obscurity thrown in.

michaelmior 10y ago
If it's open source, how can you hope you achieve security through obscurity?
- sixhobbits 10y ago
  evil hax0r has database of leaked hashes from shittyonlinewebappyoudidntknowyousignedupfor.com, which includes your email address and a bad hash of your password. They run them through some standard password dictionaries using hashcat and break all of the 'letmein', 'monkey', 'qwerty', '111111' passwords within seconds. Then they run some bigger dictionaries and some nice rule-sets and crack another 50%. Then they start trying to crack the more difficult ones. GPUs come out and some fancy machine learning. Then they do some specialised stuff, like implementing the LessPass open source function to start trying to crack LessPass specific passwords. This is now as difficult to crack as your master password for LessPass, but it's "security through obscurity" because they have to guess that you use LessPass, and will probably only start attacking your password once all the low-hanging fruit is gone, giving you more time to change your password/ delete your affected account, etc.

iKlsR 10y ago

Enpass is my goto, recently recommended it to some people as well and all are happy. I have it on my phone as well as work PC, personal laptop and a linux box. One master password and it's all local, I just use dropbox to sync the encrypted "wallet" so I have my accounts on all my devices. https://www.enpass.io/ https://www.enpass.io/

atemerev 10y ago

OK, fine. This is one thing I can finally use. (I can't use regular storage-based password managers, as I have ADD and I will lose my password file. If it is backed up, I will lose a backup, or I will forget to update it when passwords are changed, or something else. I always screw such things up, this is absolutely inevitable, so I have to prepare. To compensate, my symbolic memory is excellent, so I just chose to memorize all my passwords, as I can't lose my head. But even my memory has limits, and I had to lose some entropy on my passwords to keep them all in my head.) Now, I will get the best of both worlds.

teach 10y ago
What's wrong with something like Lastpass?
- atemerev 10y ago
  Lastpass is something I have no control of. Leaks can happen (already have: https://blog.lastpass.com/2015/06/lastpass-security-notice.html/ https://blog.lastpass.com/2015/06/lastpass-security-notice.h...). More importantly, DDoS can happen, and I will be out of access to everything.
  - blueplanet200 10y ago
    Lastpass stores your password encrypted. If in your threat model you're unwilling to use Lastpass because of the leakability of the master database, you should avoid Lesspass since trying to guess your password on Webstie X given Lastpass database is more/less the same as trying to guess it given you're using Lesspass.
    - atemerev 10y ago
      Like I said before, leakability of master database is not that big concern. DDoS on Lastpass, however, is a very likely scenario, especially in the light of recent high-profile DDoS attacks.

sonofgod 10y ago

Don't use this if you're ever going to type in a password where the screen might be shared -- the constantly-updating "is my password correct" glyphs give away enough information to make it super trivial to decode by eye. PS: the password for the demonstration gif is "passwordpassword"

guillaume20100 10y ago
@dragondave on github open an issue https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/48 https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/48. We are working on it.
spb 10y ago
This is why I designed the similarly-updating glyphs in surpass (https://stuartpb.github.io/surpass/demo.html https://stuartpb.github.io/surpass/demo.html) to only update after a half-second delay when masked.

mikegerwitz 10y ago

See also gnu-pw-mgr (CLI): https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-pw-mgr https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-pw-mgr It generates passwords based on a secret key ("seed") and memorized transformations to URLs. You can adapt that to use a master password, if you so desire, by using a password as a base for such a transformation, but that's not built in.

Nux 10y ago

Nice idea and willing to try it, but.. "The requirement for self-hosting is to have docker and docker-compose installed on your machine." Fsck that. If I will trust this with my passwords, I need to know how to _really_ install it. I can't trust you if all you have to offer is a steaming pile of docker or your idea of how I should run my systems.

fapjacks 10y ago
If you knew anything about the applications you disparage, you would know how to take a Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml file and determine exactly how to install it on your system. Since that's what they do.
- Nux 10y ago
  Of course that I know how to do that. What bothers me is the first approach they take.

tim333 10y ago

How it works roughly: https://blog.lesspass.com/lesspass-how-it-works-dde742dd18a4#.wwoj952kz https://blog.lesspass.com/lesspass-how-it-works-dde742dd18a4... It seems they take info from the site (its name?) plus your master password and hash them - "LessPass uses PBKDF2 with 8192 iterations and a hash function sha-256." I guess they then produce something of the required length and characters from the hash. Guess it's ok till someone finds your master password.

Ruphin 10y ago

Hi Guillaume, Your master password is 'passwordpassword'. 10 points if you know how I figured that out :)

PuffinBlue 10y ago
An issue was raised for this over on GitHub[1] after it was pointed out by others. Quite an interesting example of how easy it is to slip up and make something trivially crackable. [1] https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/48 https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/48

JulianMorrison 10y ago

What this seems to be, in essence: password = HMAC(key, website). Why this is bad, compared to an encrypted on-disk key store: 1. A password is now ciphertext, not a block of line noise. Every time you transmit it, you are giving away potential clues of use to an attacker. 2. The search space for possible passwords is bounded if you know the website. You are subject to key guessing attacks. If your key is short, pure serial guessing will break it fast. 3. They don't need any access to you or your stuff, to guess a key. They don't even need access to the server, it can be guessed on an unrelated machine. You don't have the opportunity to detect a break-in and neither does your bank, etc. 4. You only have one password for all the sites, really, underneath, and it's your secret key. If it's broken, it's now a skeleton-key and your digital ass is theirs.

obi1kenobi 10y ago
I completely agree. What makes all of it even worse is that they only use 8192 iterations of PBKDF2, based on their blog post [1]. To counter GPU-based password cracking, 100,000+ iterations are needed as of 5 years ago [2]. [1] https://blog.lesspass.com/lesspass-how-it-works-dde742dd18a4 https://blog.lesspass.com/lesspass-how-it-works-dde742dd18a4 [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6054082/recommended-of-iterations-when-using-pbkdf2-sha256 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6054082/recommended-of-it...
- problems 10y ago
  Yeah, going to Scrypt or Argon2 would mitigate a lot of the GPU-based concerns while still offering reasonable in-browser performance.
  - homakov 10y ago
    Scrypt seems to be performing better in the browser because of 32 bit operations. Argon2 in browser was slow in my tests.
    - cyphar 10y ago

shawnzvinis 10y ago

Thanks for building and posting this! I regularly think about being "locked out" of everything if I were to loose all my devices (e.g. get robbed). I hope this product will evolve to solve some of the concerns people have raised above.

guillaume20100 10y ago

I'm the creator of LessPass. We did not expect as many visits on our website. Thank you. We are working on: * encrypt password profiles client side. * help user change their master passwords (https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/36 https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/36) * mobile version(https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/6 https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/6) Change his master password seems to be the biggest problem for many of you. We will address this problem as a priority.

SimplGy 10y ago
I want to start using this, but I'm concerned what happens when a service changes their domain. When the domain changes, even subtly like from api.foo.com to www.foo.com, it will break my ability to access the site. If I do not remember the previous URL, I will not be able to recover it. More details in this github issue comment: https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/45#issuecomment-261335020 https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/45#issuecomment-... Has this been a real-life concern for you while you've used the tool?
palant 10y ago
I was quite surprised to see your extension, it is very similar to my Easy Passwords extension in both concept and design. I've had a brief look at the source code and I guess that it was a completely unrelated development after all? Please increase the number of iterations, PBKDF2 with 8192 iterations is a very bad idea in year 2016. I would consider 100k iteration the lower limit, my Easy Passwords extension uses 256k. For reference, I described the threat scenario here: https://palant.de/2016/04/20/security-considerations-for-password-generators https://palant.de/2016/04/20/security-considerations-for-pas... Note that LastPass isn't a good example when it comes to security-relevant decisions. If you are interested, I published a lengthy writeup under https://security.stackexchange.com/a/137307/4778 https://security.stackexchange.com/a/137307/4778.
- guillaume20100 10y ago
  Hi Palant, I found your app in the comment today. So yes, LessPass was developed it independently. And yes we are working in a way to change the number of rounds of PBKDF2. https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/38 https://github.com/lesspass/lesspass/issues/38 API already evolve (https://github.com/lesspass/core/commit/70bebd5e5bcd0c9a32ac6aee05ea4586f0a8773a https://github.com/lesspass/core/commit/70bebd5e5bcd0c9a32ac...), we are updating the user interface.

mehdix 10y ago

I use [pass](https://www.passwordstore.org/ https://www.passwordstore.org/) which is an open source command line password manager. It uses gpg to encrypt passwords which in turn is setup to use a hardware key with its own password. The downside is the metadata which is exposed in file system tree, however the data is stored on a dm-crypted disk. Difficult to setup but much more secure.

libeclipse 10y ago

I made something similar to this: https://github.com/libeclipse/visionary https://github.com/libeclipse/visionary Works by using a master password and a keyword to generate a seed, then applies various deterministic algorithms to generate multiple passwords.

leshow 10y ago

I did a quick over-look of the information on the site, but it looks to me that this is a pretty bad 'password manager' it looks like anyone can try to brute force your password based on the login/site combo. can someone tell me why i'm wrong here?

dexterdog 10y ago

Why do none of the password managers integrate a decent xkcd password option? I like having a complex password, but God forbid I have to ever read it from my phone and type it somewhere else. xkcd is easy. Use a word dictionary pick a few words and delimit them with special characters. Mix the case as an option, too.

hogrammer 10y ago