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This seems like a fundamental problem, if you store a secret locally, you can read it locally. I was skeptical/curious how Windows's Credential Manager could h
by tux3 4y ago
This seems like a fundamental problem, if you store a secret locally, you can read it locally.
I was skeptical/curious how Windows's Credential Manager could have gotten around that, but Stackexchange says this (https://security.stackexchange.com/a/120001/76848 https://security.stackexchange.com/a/120001/76848):
> The Windows Credential Manager is anything but secure. It's "secure" at the user account level, which means that any process that the user ever runs and the user themselves must necessarily be trusted in order to call this system "secure" with a straight face.
So this should be about as secure as Chrome or Firefox's storage. A small layer of obfuscation to deter the least motivated script kiddies, but nothing that changes the nature of the problem. If you store secrets under your user account, then programs running under your user account can also read them back.
- yrro 4y agoB-b-but the Windows Credential Manager asks me to authenticate before it shows me the value of any saved passwords! It must be secure, right?
- Xylakant 4y agoIt’s true that protecting against processes running under the users account is hard, but exploiting that would require code execution Accessing a secret in a file does not necessarily. It could be stored on a network share, included in a backup or archive or an attacker could confuse a program into handing them the file. Especially that used to be a very common attack against browsers.
- jwond 4y agoWhile the Windows Credential Manager doesn’t really have any access controls below the user account level, the same is not true for the Mac Keychain. By default if an app tries to read a keychain entry that was created by another app then the user will be prompted to allow or deny access.