7 ms·

I have little faith site developers care about password managers. Many even try to block them from working due to some perceived notion that they are insecure.

by yoz-y 6y ago

tweetle_beetle 6y ago
I remember using a company-mandated pension website which required a very long password with a comprehensive selection of complexity requirements. To log in, the password had to be entered twice, but they had disabled the ability to use a password manager to populate them (I forget the exact mechanism). To me this is the worst of all worlds. If you put people off using your website, you are less likely to have breaches - security through misery. I wrote to them pointing out the issue and apparently it was put on their backlog for the following year. I think I received an update about it a couple of years later.
- mPReDiToR 6y ago
  I recently got an OnlyKey. It plugs in as an HID so that passwords appear to have been typed in, not PW managed. Useful little thing, it seems too good to be true.
  - yosito 6y ago
    OnlyKey looks interesting. A few things make me skeptical though: It only supports 24 accounts, which is two orders of magnitude fewer than I have in my password manager. And the hardware design doesn't look super convenient or durable. I bought a YubiKey a few years ago, and kept in on my keychain, and before I had even used it a dozen times, the entire thing disintegrated and became unusable. Edit: I'm also a bit uneasy about securing access to all by accounts by one single PIN that can be used to unlock a physical device that is easy for someone to steal unnoticed.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    This means the password manager can’t check it isn’t entering your credentials on app1e.com
- EveYoung 6y ago
  My broker asks for 4-5 random letters of my password each time, making password managers unusable as well. Thinking about it now, how would you encrypt a password using this method? Create hashes of every combination?
  - chedabob 6y ago
    Possibly using this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing I think a lot of implementations don't do anything clever and just have a fixed set of combinations they use each time, so the number of stored hashes is smaller.
    - KMag 6y ago
      I thought about something similar to Shamir's Secret Sharing, polynomial fitting over a finite field, but in this case, information theory is working against you. With Shamir's Secret Sharing, you start out with your secret expressed as a finite field element, and pick N-1 polynomial coefficients uniformly randomly from your finite field, and give M different participants values of the polynomial evaluated at different points. Information theory shows that having at most N-1 points on the polynomial still leaks no information about F(0). It's as secure as a one-time pad, and in the degenerate case of N=2 over a Galois field, is in fact a XOR-based one-time-pad. The amount of entropy added at generation time is greater than the amount of entropy in the secret. In this partial password case, you'd want the "shared secret" to be a single value, and construct a polynomial such that, say 4 field elements, would always be sufficient to recover the same "secret". You're running the algorithm the wrong way, and unless you're forcing a password on the person, those letters are actually low-entropy instead of maximal entropy field points as in Shamir Secret Sharing. I really don't see a way to use polynomial interpolation in this way without leaking entropy. I thought about using something similar to Schnorr threshold signatures[0] to solve the information leakage, but then you end up storing one elliptic curve public key per password letter, and the private key for each public key is a single letter, so trivial to bruit-force. [0] https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/852.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/852.pdf
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
- rawoke083600 6y ago
  PeopleSoft ? (Poephol-Soft in dutch/afrikaans) as we used to call it !
- michaelcampbell 6y ago
  There are browser plugins and script-injector-modifiers that help with this. "Don't Fuck With Paste" is one I use. But yeah, that's infuriating.
metafunctor 6y ago
What, is "password managers are insecure" really a thing?
- wccrawford 6y ago
  Yup. And they are, technically, because if someone has that one login and password, they can access all your accounts. But it turns out that keeping that 1 login and password in your head and trusting the rest to your password service (especially if you let it make random passwords) is way more secure than what people do if they have to try to keep them all in their head. So it's about relative security. Both sides are correct, in their narrow views of the situation.
  - yoz-y 6y ago
    I believe security should optimise for the threat levels on the order of importance. No.1 is password reuse, which is what password managers solve.
- yoz-y 6y ago
  Yes, if not explicitly then by their actions definitely. E.g.: there is only a single bank in France that hasn't switched to a stupid 6-8 digit system where you have to click buttons that appear in random order. Before then they often disabled autofill on passwords (luckily that could have been easily bypassed). They incessantly re-invent the wheel for 2-factor auth and so on. I find it very curious why banks of all institutions are those with the worst security.
  - benhurmarcel 6y ago
    Not sure if that's the bank you're talking about, but FYI Fortuneo lets you use a normal password.
    - yoz-y 6y ago
      Yep, Fortuneo is the one still having sane security. There might be others but when I was bank-shopping I haven't found one.
nkrisc 6y ago
But they (or their bosses) will care if credit card details can't be auto populated. Typically anything that slows down the user from paying gets fixed pretty quick. But you're right, browsers would have to become picky on saved credit card auto populate to force a change.
- antihero 6y ago
  Yeah but people that use password managers are TINY fraction of users.
  - croisillon 6y ago
    oh yeah after reading the OP i totally wonder why
  - kevincox 6y ago
    All modern browsers now ship with a password manager (Firefox is currently rolling out CC filling country-by-country) so that number can't be too low.

I have little faith site developers care about password managers. Many even try to block them from working due to some perceived notion that they are insecure.

by yoz-y 6y ago

I have little faith site developers care about password managers. Many even try to block them from working due to some perceived notion that they are insecure.

tweetle_beetle 6y ago

I remember using a company-mandated pension website which required a very long password with a comprehensive selection of complexity requirements. To log in, the password had to be entered twice, but they had disabled the ability to use a password manager to populate them (I forget the exact mechanism). To me this is the worst of all worlds. If you put people off using your website, you are less likely to have breaches - security through misery. I wrote to them pointing out the issue and apparently it was put on their backlog for the following year. I think I received an update about it a couple of years later.

mPReDiToR 6y ago
I recently got an OnlyKey. It plugs in as an HID so that passwords appear to have been typed in, not PW managed. Useful little thing, it seems too good to be true.
- yosito 6y ago
  OnlyKey looks interesting. A few things make me skeptical though: It only supports 24 accounts, which is two orders of magnitude fewer than I have in my password manager. And the hardware design doesn't look super convenient or durable. I bought a YubiKey a few years ago, and kept in on my keychain, and before I had even used it a dozen times, the entire thing disintegrated and became unusable. Edit: I'm also a bit uneasy about securing access to all by accounts by one single PIN that can be used to unlock a physical device that is easy for someone to steal unnoticed.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  This means the password manager can’t check it isn’t entering your credentials on app1e.com
EveYoung 6y ago
My broker asks for 4-5 random letters of my password each time, making password managers unusable as well. Thinking about it now, how would you encrypt a password using this method? Create hashes of every combination?
- chedabob 6y ago
  Possibly using this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing I think a lot of implementations don't do anything clever and just have a fixed set of combinations they use each time, so the number of stored hashes is smaller.
  - KMag 6y ago
    I thought about something similar to Shamir's Secret Sharing, polynomial fitting over a finite field, but in this case, information theory is working against you. With Shamir's Secret Sharing, you start out with your secret expressed as a finite field element, and pick N-1 polynomial coefficients uniformly randomly from your finite field, and give M different participants values of the polynomial evaluated at different points. Information theory shows that having at most N-1 points on the polynomial still leaks no information about F(0). It's as secure as a one-time pad, and in the degenerate case of N=2 over a Galois field, is in fact a XOR-based one-time-pad. The amount of entropy added at generation time is greater than the amount of entropy in the secret. In this partial password case, you'd want the "shared secret" to be a single value, and construct a polynomial such that, say 4 field elements, would always be sufficient to recover the same "secret". You're running the algorithm the wrong way, and unless you're forcing a password on the person, those letters are actually low-entropy instead of maximal entropy field points as in Shamir Secret Sharing. I really don't see a way to use polynomial interpolation in this way without leaking entropy. I thought about using something similar to Schnorr threshold signatures[0] to solve the information leakage, but then you end up storing one elliptic curve public key per password letter, and the private key for each public key is a single letter, so trivial to bruit-force. [0] https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/852.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/852.pdf
- colejohnson66 6y ago
rawoke083600 6y ago
PeopleSoft ? (Poephol-Soft in dutch/afrikaans) as we used to call it !
michaelcampbell 6y ago
There are browser plugins and script-injector-modifiers that help with this. "Don't Fuck With Paste" is one I use. But yeah, that's infuriating.

metafunctor 6y ago

What, is "password managers are insecure" really a thing?

wccrawford 6y ago
Yup. And they are, technically, because if someone has that one login and password, they can access all your accounts. But it turns out that keeping that 1 login and password in your head and trusting the rest to your password service (especially if you let it make random passwords) is way more secure than what people do if they have to try to keep them all in their head. So it's about relative security. Both sides are correct, in their narrow views of the situation.
- yoz-y 6y ago
  I believe security should optimise for the threat levels on the order of importance. No.1 is password reuse, which is what password managers solve.
yoz-y 6y ago
Yes, if not explicitly then by their actions definitely. E.g.: there is only a single bank in France that hasn't switched to a stupid 6-8 digit system where you have to click buttons that appear in random order. Before then they often disabled autofill on passwords (luckily that could have been easily bypassed). They incessantly re-invent the wheel for 2-factor auth and so on. I find it very curious why banks of all institutions are those with the worst security.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  Not sure if that's the bank you're talking about, but FYI Fortuneo lets you use a normal password.
  - yoz-y 6y ago
    Yep, Fortuneo is the one still having sane security. There might be others but when I was bank-shopping I haven't found one.

nkrisc 6y ago

But they (or their bosses) will care if credit card details can't be auto populated. Typically anything that slows down the user from paying gets fixed pretty quick. But you're right, browsers would have to become picky on saved credit card auto populate to force a change.

antihero 6y ago
Yeah but people that use password managers are TINY fraction of users.
- croisillon 6y ago
  oh yeah after reading the OP i totally wonder why
- kevincox 6y ago
  All modern browsers now ship with a password manager (Firefox is currently rolling out CC filling country-by-country) so that number can't be too low.