10 ms·
PSA: LastPass Does Not Encrypt Everything in Your Vault
- elastic_church 10y ago"I wonder what the Federal Trade Commission thinks about that claim" Would be my reply to the email, coupled with my demands.
- mulrian 10y agoI don't see this as much of an issue personally. I don't ever store any identifying information in urls, so it's more of a convenience to have the logos for easy navigation. I get that they say that everything is encrypted, but really it could be a lot worse. I definitely won't be switching password managers just because of this like some people are saying.
- 010a 10y agoIts a pretty huge deal if you store passwords for websites that you don't want other people to know you even have an account for. Like, say, a dissident in a politically oppressed country having an account for the US immigrations website.
- pg_is_a_butt 10y agoding ding ding ding.
- cheez 10y agoI had the same reaction when I saw the Google logo in my vault: "how do they know?"
- mercnet 10y agoAnyone have recommendation for replacing Lastpass? I need support for Android, Linux, and Windows. I would like to be in control of my data if possible (sync to cloud) and a nice to have would be a browser extension for autocomplete.
- problems 10y agoKeePass, it's well supported on mobile platforms and has decent browser addons. Looks like their Argon2/ChaCha20 based KDBX4 format is now out too, so I've got some upgrading to do.
- Flimm 10y agoKeePass doesn't have sync or sharing features.
- problems 10y agoSync is easily achievable, I use Syncthing to go between my phone, dev server and desktop. Other options are the usual suspects, Dropbox, BT Sync, etc. As for sharing - yeah, you probably lose that. Well, unless you sync a separate DB or something.
- beart 10y agoYou can easily use it in conjunction with drop box or any other file sync program.
- cmdrfred 10y agoYes it does you just have to run your own server. http://keepass.info/help/v2/sync.html http://keepass.info/help/v2/sync.html
- someguy101010 10y agoit isn't difficult to share a database file for KeePass and you could easily set up a sync interface for it with github
- 10y ago
- Flimm 10y agoLastPass is so buggy, I have a draft blog post that I'm going to publish some day listing the dozens of bugs I've found. It's still the least worse cross-platform password manager (with sharing and sync features) that I've tried. Bitwarden looks interesting, but it doesn't seem to support team features, nor does it seem to have any documentation, or even an "about us" page.
- matheweis 10y agoLeast worst? What are the issues with 1Password?
- brightball 10y agoIs there a Linux client now?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- raverbashing 10y agoPricing model Lack of linux client (which I suspect are more likely to pay for a password management system)
- btown 10y agoWhile I haven't used 1Password on Windows, it's come a long way in the last year or so, so that it's now a first-class cloud-based password manager with sharing, sync, and cross-platform clients, as well as the ability to belong to multiple organization-level accounts at a time (great for us serial entrepreneurs!). 1Password's Mac browser plugins actually communicate with the native client running in the background and doing the heavy lifting, which I think is a better security model as the plugins only need to worry about securing the localhost communications channel, rather than securing any data caches or doing any cryptography themselves. I've left LastPass entirely, and good riddance.
- 10y ago
- EGreg 10y agoI have a question to all the hackers here about personal identity managers and UX. There are projects to decentralize personal identity and move away from passwords, such as Solid (https://solid.mit.edu https://solid.mit.edu) and our own project, Qbix (https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform). The WeChat article recently posted shows one major thing about user behavior and UX architecture. Users actually prefer to have one APP on their phone representing their social identity, have all their notifications, contacts, etc. from all different communities in the app. So this probably means that the "personal identity server" should have some default protocol to receive notifications (encrypted with user's public key) and an APP for iOS and Android. The server would have rules for processing notifications and may notify the user (eg it may stop after the first 5 or set do not disturb where only the badge updates). Upon opening the app the user would see all the notifications from all the other services (they would be fetched and decrypted). And those notifications may contain deep-links back into flows that generated the notifications, eg a chat. What is also nice is if you can have these rules be general purpose hooks that run on the client in some isolated JS environment. Then for example you can update the list of ids that a user's contacts have on different services (if you have pairwise anonymity) in the background. And next time you visit a website the auth extension/library/app can offer to connect you with those people on that website. I think the Personal App should display badges corresponding to the # of websites that have caused notifications, not the # of notifications. The latter should appear only when you open the app and see the list of relying party websites. Then each website can have a # of notifications next to it and the can be sorted eg by most recent or most urgent notifications. Last thing - by having a personal APP I have a feeling that it would also be tied in with payments in the future. Identity service is becoming tied with payments (to prevent fraud, China now ties the two together more than any other country and cash is disappearing). So the Personal App could in the future have some standard for attaching payment methods and using them without giving the relying party anything except tokens representing payment plans the user agreed to (like Stripe does). In this way, even though payments are increasingly tied to identity - which may lead to fascism - we can empower local communities to control the identity and maybe in the future even issue their own money on their own credit! This may help finance loans for poor people in India etc. (already shown that having a large group guarantee loans works better for everyone due to social factors etc.) and pull people out of poverty faster. @mediaprophet what do you think of these points about integrating payments inside identity App in the future? (By the way I say community because you may host your own data AND your own identity on your own server but when it comes to reputation and payments, there has to be some others who give you this value. Maybe it will not be communities. Maybe it will be completely distributed with no centers. But so far in history, wealth and reputation and power has always found a way to concentrate itself at least a little.)
- mistercow 10y agoThis doesn't seem like a terribly important information leak, but what gets me is that they obfuscated it by converting it to hex. Why do that? On the one hand, it feels like they're being sneaky and trying to trick savvier users who might glance at the data to make sure it "looks encrypted". On the other hand, they have to have realized someone would notice eventually. Or maybe that's the point: if they obfuscated it well, someone would break it and they'd have egg on their faces. By just hiding it a little, they have plausible deniability that they weren't trying to obfuscate. But any way you slice it, it seems weird.
- daveFNbuck 10y agoIt's probably just easier to convert it to hex rather than worry about escaping characters. I've done that before.
- mistercow 10y agoYeah, good point, although URL escaping is particularly easy.
- rocqua 10y agoConversion to hex is probably to deal with characters that would require conversion if a part of the URL.
- jogjayr 10y agoStupid question: why can't LastPass encrypt the URL as well and decrypt client-side to show the logo, like they do (as I understand it) with passwords?
- chaosfox 10y agothat seems a better solution, but lastpass would still know that user_x is downloading the google.com logo.
- ehsankia 10y agoThey can, probably an oversight. Hopefully once this article makes the rounds they'll reconsider.
- guntars 10y agoThe client still needs to fetch the logos from somewhere so it has to upload a list of URLs to get the logos for. They've just opted to do it when saving a password entry.
- jerf 10y agoIt probably wouldn't be infeasible to send the client all the logos they have. The client could then pick them out with no server interaction. There's only going to be thousands of them, tops, and probably only hundreds. Hooray powerlaw. This might be modestly annoyingly resource intensive for mobile, probably not an issue for desktops.
- lima 10y agoWhat's wrong with Chrome's built-in password manager nowadays?
- beambot 10y agoAnyone with access to your computer can look at the plaintext passwords in Chrome just by going to settings > passwords > show. It's been a long-standing dispute... Chrome says "if people have physical access, security is broken anyway." But that's because they refuse to acknowledge the lesser threat model; "A non-tech savvy friend or family member borrowing my computer for 20 min" -or- "my computer gets stolen from my desk while I was logged in... and now they have access to all chrome passwords in plaintext." It's infuriating. Wish they'd fix that, even if it's a superficial fix.
- holtalanm 10y agoNot on windows. On windows is requires your windows password to unlock your passwords. Actually, I think it does that on Mac OS too. Don't know about Linux, since I haven't tried it.
- drdaeman 10y agoIt has support for Gnome Keyring or KWallet (IIRC, default is `--password-store=detect`). If you're using either, then it's the same.
- lima 10y agoYes, it's using the gnome-keyring which requires unlocking. How is this less secure than using LastPass or KeePass?
- compuguy 10y agoHasn't this changed in recent versions with the move to google smart lock?
- jdc0589 10y ago
- mikeash 10y agoIt's really weird that the URL parameter is encoded as hex. Is this some attempt to hide it, or just a lazy programmer not wanting to call an escape function?
- AdmiralAsshat 10y agoBack to the Metadata problem. Here's how this information could be weaponized: NSA: LastPass, we suspect that John Smith uses your service. Give us access to John Smith's password database. LastPass: We cannot, all of John's usernames and passwords are encrypted and we ourselves don't have the key. NSA: Alright, then, give us the websites for which John Smith's database has credentials for, and we'll subpoena each website of interest individually. If John Smith has known email address JohnSmith@gmail.com, it is probably safe to assume that the email is the login for at least some of the websites of interest, and can then ask each website for info on that particular user.
- valarauca1 10y agoYour tin foil hat is on a bit too tight. 1. The NSA already has that data they have your home address (this is public) and can see you connect to gmail servers at times you are normally home for. We've already seen evidence this is well within the NSA's capabilities based on the Dread Pirate Robert's trial. 2. LastPass's RNG is closed source so if your threat model includes the NSA you've already lost as it is very reasonable the NSA knows every password LastPass could ever generate for you. 3. LastPass's encryption/decryption is ALSO closed source so there is no reason the NSA can't just subpoena them to update your client with a faulty crypto. 4. LastPass Apps/Browser phone home once unlocked. If subpoena by the NSA they can steal your password there. Seriously if you have a threat model that includes the NSA you've already lost.
- dublinben 10y agoDPR had terrible OPSEC. We should all learn from his failures. You are completely correct that any threat model that includes direct attention from the NSA is insurmountable. Even highly skilled targets like OBL are eventually defeated.
- Bartweiss 10y agoOBL seems like an odd example for "insurmountable". He was probably the target of more US gov't attention than anyone else who isn't running a country. After more than a decade of active pursuit, he was compromised by a largely non-digital security breakdown. I agree with the general point about direct attention, but OBL seems closer to the exception than norm.
- martey 10y agoIs there is any proof that the "Concerned LastPass User" who wrote this isn't just the creator of BitWarden? I normally don't assume astroturfing without concrete evidence, but there is no information in the post that explains why the author is anonymous and the creator of BitWarden has previously made comments without disclosing their affiliation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12754396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12754396).
- mikeash 10y agoDoes it matter? If the claim is true, then it's a serious problem. If it's untrue, then the article is wrong. Neither one is changed if the author is a particular person.
- holtalanm 10y agoI really don't see how this is a "serious problem". The only thing unencrypted is the site's domain name. Who cares? Site domains are public anyways. Definitely two opinions on this matter, I suppose. But for me, I really don't care that they don't encrypt the domain names for the sites.
- rocqua 10y agoMetadata matters. The NSA revelations have shown this. For a really simple example, I guess there are quite a few people with a pornhub account in their vault. I'd guess a significant portion of those users don't want that fact to become public.
- danbruc 10y agoDomain names are public, what should not be public is the set of domain names you have accounts for.
- dsp1234 10y agoIt's not just the domain name, it's the full URL. Which could contain embedded username, organizational and/or sensitive information. FTA, which is clearly more than a domain name: https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin
- bearcobra 10y agoI got a license for 1Password Families in a Humble Bundle recently and have been seriously considering making the switch from LastPass. The LastPass Chrome extension gets disabled on me once or twice a week and has become a real annoyance. The only thing holding me back is the ongoing pricing for 1Password is 5x more than LastPass.
- valarauca1 10y agoThe article is 504'ing Did they delete it?
- msimpson 10y agoMedium is having issues: https://medium.statuspage.io/ https://medium.statuspage.io/
- astral303 10y agoI think this is NOT the case. You are looking at intermediate data of what's stored in your decrypted blob. Yes, some things are encrypted twice in the Lastpass vault. The contents considered "unencrypted" by the blog post are actually only accessible after your private key has been provided. "How can Lastpass show me the Google logo?" It's shown by your Lastpass Extension, after your vault has been decrypted with your password. It's the same reason that Lastpass can show you the password saved for Google! Notice that request has an unencrypted folder name, "Email." Those folder names are only accessible after the decryption of the entire vault. URLs are encrypted. LastPass does not know your URLs. I noticed the article does not include the destination URL for this request, only the parameters. So I can't make a determination as to why this request was made and who the destination server is. I just tried adding a new site to the "Email" folder, and no requests to remote servers showed up in my Network tab. IF the LastPass extension really does make a call to lastpass.com with this information, then, yes, there is a possibility that Lastpass can track these hashes in some separate store. But that doesn't mean that the encrypted vault blob has the unencrypted data as claimed.
- jzl 10y agoAgreed that the vault blob almost certainly hides all of this, but the question still remains about how the logo is initially obtained. There still might be a leak to lastpass when the logo url is first requested. And if the extension is pulling the logo from the web then there is also a leak to each site whenever it pulls (rather than to lastpass itself). Best case scenario: the extension comes with a list of the most common logos baked into it. But if that's the case, why would it save a logo url. Hmm ... I'm pretty sure we'll be hearing back from Lastpass on this one.
- pvg 10y agothere is also a leak to each site That's not really a leak unless you're keeping a password to some site without actually using the site and don't want the site to know you've done this. But that probably doesn't come up often in practice.
- 10y ago
- tscs37 10y agoWell, I'd love to use something other than Lastpass but there are no other password managers that are as well integrated into chrome and that sync seamlessly. Keepass had tons of issues on the synch-side, merging incorrectly or just plain not syncing in addition to the android app being horrible to some extend. Additionally the chrome plugin is less well written, it's not bad but not as easy to access as lastpass. 1password is still not out on linux and I have no intention of using them until they bring out a linux client. Bitwarden looks fishy to me (audit? pricing? funding? integration?). If the only problem with Lastpass is that they sent out the URL of the site in cleartext over a HTTPS connection, fine, have it, there is clearly worse and it's something I'm willing to accept in exchange for one of the better password managers.
- jasikpark 10y agoHave you seen enpass? It is basically a more polished version of Keepass. https://enpass.io https://enpass.io
- tscs37 10y agoenpass certainly looks interesting, the UI looks atleast as polished as lastpass. I'll give it a short drive. Thanks for sharing.
- baldfat 10y agoThis is an issue that every password manager ever created would have if they requested information about what sites are being used. Same information that your internet provider already has linked to your ISP and can be retired by a warrant or no warrant.
- perfectfire 10y ago> the android app being horrible to some extend. Really? Were you using KeePassDroid? I remember that being not so great. I think Keepass2Android is excellent.
- tscs37 10y ago
- smnscu 10y agoAs someone who's worked in this domain, I found this very poorly handled. The obvious, privacy-conscious solution, would be to embed all logos in the client, but this can be unfeasible on the web, depending on the quantity of data. In practice, maybe sacrificing a couple of MB for a one time download isn't such a bad trade-off for privacy (and this will only happen for logged-in users who visit their vault). However, if we want to trade off _some_, but not all privacy (in terms of what logins a vault contains), I can think of a naive obfuscation scheme where random domains are added to a login alongside the real one. Here's how that could work: Preprocessing * assign an order to the logos and hence numerical IDs * pick a hash function (URL / site name) => ID User adds a new login: * is the URL recognized (e.g. accounts.google.com) i.e. do we have a logo for it? * if yes, obtain its ID e.g. 1 * get N more random IDs e.g. 14, 124, 144 * save all of them as the login's metadata e.g. "logo_cache:1,14,124,144" User requests logins (and hence needs logos): * compute (and cache) the list of IDs of logos needed (M entries x N logo IDs each, deduped) * pack and send the logos (hopefully a much smaller subset than all logos)
- gleb 10y agoIf they have access to URLs that's even more bad than it seems. The URLs are often registration form urls and can have secret data as url parameters. LastPass needs to comment on this. It looks pretty bad.
- mnm1 10y agoLastpass is an atrocity to software. In almost a year using it (including its "Premium" version), I was unable to get their password change feature working and it was often unable to remember passwords properly. I would change the password, Lastpass would show the right password in its UI, then it would use the wrong one. This is the most basic feature of a password manager and it simply doesn't work. Their support, even for the paid version, might as well be a bot that just spits out random Lastpass "facts". I see a ton of reviews all over the Internet claiming it's one of the best password managers, and I wonder if these reviewers and websites didn't just get paid some money to write a positive review without ever installing, let alone using the software. With the software being so shoddy, I would not trust my passwords to Lastpass even if they ended up fixing the UX. I ended up deleting my account and switching to Enpass which has worked flawlessly. On top of that, I don't have to trust Lastpass, or any shitty company like that, with my most valuable data and can sync it over WiFi, my NAS, and shared folders in addition to cloud providers (also works in Linux).
- zeveb 10y agoThe (otherwise excellent) Password Store program effectively does the same thing. Folks, encrypt _everything_. Anything less is profoundly foolish.
- dbg31415 10y agoI really like a lot of the features of LastPass... works across devices, has groups with sharing options for teams, security audit and summary, auto updates (on some sites), 2FA, and the dead man's switch is nice... I haven't found any other services that work as well for teams with features like this. I've tried 1Password and some others and found their team sharing options lacking. Curious what other teams are using -- not just personal password managers but tools you can use successfully over an entire organization.
- acejam 10y agoI've heard many bad things about LastPass - and this is just the cherry on top. I highly recommend 1Password to everyone. I've been using it for about 2-3 years now and it's been absolutely flawless. Yes, it doesn't have a Linux client, but that's literally the only "drawback" I can think of. As a developer who uses a Mac, the only time I'm on Linux is when I'm SSH'd into a server.
- Walkman 10y agoAnd for a developer who uses Linux desktop for development every day, this is a no-go.
- dkonofalski 10y agoIt does run just fine in Wine, though. I've got a Ubuntu box that's been running it with Dropbox and it syncs and runs just as well as my Mac version.
- jenoer 10y agoPerhaps a silly question as I do not have a lot of experience with software like this, but: What prevents Lastpass, bitwarden or any other third-party to update their software (and/or compromise the download server) to synchronize all information un-encrypted in a new version which is auto-updated by the user? I currently use KeePassX, and synchronize this file with a secure server myself since I feel uncomfortable with having software that handles the encryption also controlling the synchronizing service.
- fapjacks 10y agoThe answer to your question: Absolutely nothing.
- sliken 10y agoTwo fixes: 1) find an opensource one, compile it yourself, verify it's behavior, install it yourself 2) find one that works without using network, don't approve adding network permissions ever, run it in a jail without network, on android you can deny the network permission. This works again random software companies, but not against google.
- circa 10y agoI ditched LastPass after LogMeIn acquired them. With all of the bad press that company has had over the years it was enough for me to move on. For the most part I am happy with Dashlane and pay for it annually. Sometimes when chrome or firefox update it take a while to load the browser plug-in. other than that I have few complaints. Anyone else use Dashlane or something similar, other than LastPass?
- CtrlAltT5wpm 10y agoI've been using LP as a paid user for several years now, and was really annoyed when they were absorbed by LogMeIn. My main issue is this: while there are several alternatives to LP, there don't seem to be as many which have the same or similar features while ALSO integrating YubiKey's OTP functions. I bought a YubiKey because of LastPass, and slowly integrated it into my workflows. I really like it as a second factor, and the additional capabilities (such as storing secrets for TOTP, etc.) make it nearly indispensable. Last I checked (over a year ago), 1Password wasn't terribly interested in adding it as a feature, and while there was a KeePass extension which implemented HOTP-based 2nd factor, I never got it to work reliably. Is there ANY service which integrates the YubiKey as well as LP does? I'm more tied to that than I am to LP. Unrelated to the initial post, but here's a recent LP annoyance: on January 9, LP pushed an update to the Chrome extension which broke the version 3.0 view (which looked like a filesystem), forcing users to move to their 4.0 view if they wanted to use the extension. According to a user commenting on the support tab in the Chrome store, "you deleted the min.js file from your extension but your lastpass version 3 view still needs this file. cant even manually copy it back because chrome then thinks its malware. keep up the good work!" I can't speak to the veracity of the comment, but LP's forum was pretty active, and admins essentially said "don't use 3.0" as a fix. Support tickets mentioned they were aware of the issue, but not much else. To be fair, LP did say they would eventually deprecate the 3.0 view, but there was little communication about the recent update, making it seem like they don't really give a shit. I don't like their 4.0 view; it's less efficient, and more interested in making things look pretty.
- asdz 10y agoI'm an ancient Lastpass user too. But I don't think the unencrypted URL worries me. If any 3-letter agency want my history, they can just visit anyone in between me and the URL. My browser have my browsing history. My ISP have my browsing history. DNS resolvers have my browsing history. CDN have my browsing history. Proxy/VPN have my browsing history. (which some they claims they don't log at all) Basically browsing history is too accessible to anyone. If you are using network that doesn't managed by you, they have your browsing history too. (McD, Starbucks, etc) And last again like others+Lastpass have commented, your whole pile of encrypted data is encrypted together and sent to Lastpass. Did you try to read your Wireshark?