3 ms·

Before You Use a Password Manager

3 points by smacktoward 7y ago

smacktoward 7y ago
> Given how often you probably use your phone, and how painful it is to type passwords on a phone, you’ll probably want to sync your passwords to your phone. If you do, all your passwords will now be stored on your phone. You may want to review how quickly your phone will lock after you stop using it, and what mechanisms you will allow to unlock it... > Do you install your password manager on a work laptop that everyone in IT has access to? If you spend most of your time at the office, you probably end up doing a lot of personal computing on your work devices even if you’d rather be doing them somewhere else. > Do you install your password manager on devices you only use every once in a while, and thus may not be getting security updates as often as you’d like? What about laptops you install lots of random software on? What about a laptop that your family members can also install software on? Are you willing to hand copy the valueless passwords you need to use on these devices over from a device you trust with all your passwords? I use and rely on a password manager myself, and frequently recommend them to people. And yet, the above captures a very real problem with password managers, namely that they are an incomplete solution to the problem. As the above quotes illustrate, just choosing and using a password manager is not enough. You also have to essentially define an entire OPSEC regime for how you will use the password manager. You have to make a lot of complicated decisions about important tradeoffs, because without them the protection offered by the password manager is minimal. And the thing is, we know most normal people won't do this. It's too complicated and too technical. People don't want to spend their limited time on Earth weighing the pros and cons of storing their passwords online vs. offline, or storing their passwords on their laptop but not their phone, or storing some passwords in the password manager but not others. A password manager doesn't work if you think of it as a product; it only works if you approach it as part of a lifestyle, as one component of a holistic strategy that's calibrated to defeat the specific threats you expect to face. Most people are never, ever going to do that, and even if they wanted to, they don't have the level of expertise required to make those decisions, any more than I have the expertise to walk into a nuclear power plant and start giving orders just because I saw "Chernobyl" on HBO. So in a way, the more we evangelize password managers as a silver bullet, the more people I worry we are setting up for failure. I still recommend them, of course, because the alternatives are all worse. But we have to find some way to design secure systems that mesh with the way people actually use systems, or security will always be a privilege of the elite.

3 points by smacktoward 7y ago

> Given how often you probably use your phone, and how painful it is to type passwords on a phone, you’ll probably want to sync your passwords to your phone. If you do, all your passwords will now be stored on your phone. You may want to review how quickly your phone will lock after you stop using it, and what mechanisms you will allow to unlock it... > Do you install your password manager on a work laptop that everyone in IT has access to? If you spend most of your time at the office, you probably end up doing a lot of personal computing on your work devices even if you’d rather be doing them somewhere else. > Do you install your password manager on devices you only use every once in a while, and thus may not be getting security updates as often as you’d like? What about laptops you install lots of random software on? What about a laptop that your family members can also install software on? Are you willing to hand copy the valueless passwords you need to use on these devices over from a device you trust with all your passwords? I use and rely on a password manager myself, and frequently recommend them to people. And yet, the above captures a very real problem with password managers, namely that they are an incomplete solution to the problem. As the above quotes illustrate, just choosing and using a password manager is not enough. You also have to essentially define an entire OPSEC regime for how you will use the password manager. You have to make a lot of complicated decisions about important tradeoffs, because without them the protection offered by the password manager is minimal. And the thing is, we know most normal people won't do this. It's too complicated and too technical. People don't want to spend their limited time on Earth weighing the pros and cons of storing their passwords online vs. offline, or storing their passwords on their laptop but not their phone, or storing some passwords in the password manager but not others. A password manager doesn't work if you think of it as a product; it only works if you approach it as part of a lifestyle, as one component of a holistic strategy that's calibrated to defeat the specific threats you expect to face. Most people are never, ever going to do that, and even if they wanted to, they don't have the level of expertise required to make those decisions, any more than I have the expertise to walk into a nuclear power plant and start giving orders just because I saw "Chernobyl" on HBO. So in a way, the more we evangelize password managers as a silver bullet, the more people I worry we are setting up for failure. I still recommend them, of course, because the alternatives are all worse. But we have to find some way to design secure systems that mesh with the way people actually use systems, or security will always be a privilege of the elite.