4 ms·

I'm on the opposite side: I don't understand how a password manager can be compromised. Your passwords are encrypted and decrypted OFFLINE, on your device. You

I'm on the opposite side: I don't understand how a password manager can be compromised. Your passwords are encrypted and decrypted OFFLINE, on your device. You only ever send the ENCRYPTED vault. Your key never transits. How is that complicated? And how did LastPass fuck this up anyway?

drdec 4y ago
I assumed that the hackers have the encrypted vaults. Is it known that that they have unencrypted password data?
- dhdgrygev 4y ago
  No, but apparently the urls were not encrypted, so that could be quite a gold mine for blackmail.
- thot_experiment 4y ago
  I believe they are only the encrypted vaults, but with the cost of compute plummeting and the inclusion of unencrypted data alongside the encrypted data I think you have reason to worry if you believe there are people who would perform a dedicated attack on you, or you are in a class likely to be identified as high value.
  - drdec 4y ago
    Oh, absolutely, you need to test that information as exposed and react accordingly. Fortunately for me, I don't use LastPass.
  - TillE 4y ago
    > the cost of compute plummeting You should do some actual math to roughly estimate what it would take to crack a good password. Use a strong password, use a resource-intensive key derivation function, and you should feel extremely comfortable that your encrypted data will not be cracked within your lifetime.
- JoshuaEN 4y ago
  Not passwords, but the hackers have some unencrypted data because LastPass did not encrypt all vault data client-side: "The threat actor was also able to copy a backup of customer vault data from the encrypted storage container which is stored in a proprietary binary format that contains both unencrypted data, such as website URLs" - https://blog.lastpass.com/2022/12/notice-of-recent-security-incident/ https://blog.lastpass.com/2022/12/notice-of-recent-security-... The "such as..." without enumerating everything is very ominous as well.
kelnage 4y ago
As far as I know, it’s only believed that the attackers have the encrypted vaults of LastPass users. However, that does mean they can attempt to “brute force” the encryption, trying any number of passwords as often as they like - and it seems some earlier versions of LastPass used rather poor choices with that cryptography, meaning the amount of effort needed to make an attempt is lower than other similar services (plus some users may have rather poor master passwords, making them easier to guess).
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Which is why it's strange to hear Steve Gibson so breathlessly defending LastPass, claiming secrets aren't really at risk. It's like he read some white papers, met some LP employees, and decided it's unhackable. Consider that many users may have had very guessable vault passwords, and encryption generally gets weaker as hardware and techniques advance.
lucideer 4y ago
> How is that complicated? I'm not saying for a moment that Lastpass are competent (there's plenty of evidence to the contrary), but... saying that this isn't complicated seems a bit much. This is an extremely complex set of transactions where many many things can be done incorrectly. There's also of course the general as-yet-not-conclusively-solved problem of non-reproducible builds / trusting remotely-updated code.
L_Rahman 4y ago
They did encrypt the vaults. The problem is that for accounts that were opened before 2017 the used an encryption algorithm that can be cracked with modern hardware. Not a typical desktop GPU, but someone with some firepower could pick an account and crack the master password in a reasonable length of time (on the order of weeks/months).
yreg 4y ago
Yeah, I don't consider my encrypted vault to be particularly sensitive. I guess someone could key log my master password on my device, copy my vault and pwn me everywhere. Also, when quantum computing becomes practical enough we password manager users might be in trouble, but surely in that case major changes in infosec would be needed regardless.
- granddave 4y ago
  This is where 2FA comes in to play.

drdec 4y ago

I assumed that the hackers have the encrypted vaults. Is it known that that they have unencrypted password data?

dhdgrygev 4y ago
No, but apparently the urls were not encrypted, so that could be quite a gold mine for blackmail.
thot_experiment 4y ago
I believe they are only the encrypted vaults, but with the cost of compute plummeting and the inclusion of unencrypted data alongside the encrypted data I think you have reason to worry if you believe there are people who would perform a dedicated attack on you, or you are in a class likely to be identified as high value.
- drdec 4y ago
  Oh, absolutely, you need to test that information as exposed and react accordingly. Fortunately for me, I don't use LastPass.
- TillE 4y ago
  > the cost of compute plummeting You should do some actual math to roughly estimate what it would take to crack a good password. Use a strong password, use a resource-intensive key derivation function, and you should feel extremely comfortable that your encrypted data will not be cracked within your lifetime.
JoshuaEN 4y ago
Not passwords, but the hackers have some unencrypted data because LastPass did not encrypt all vault data client-side: "The threat actor was also able to copy a backup of customer vault data from the encrypted storage container which is stored in a proprietary binary format that contains both unencrypted data, such as website URLs" - https://blog.lastpass.com/2022/12/notice-of-recent-security-incident/ https://blog.lastpass.com/2022/12/notice-of-recent-security-... The "such as..." without enumerating everything is very ominous as well.

kelnage 4y ago

As far as I know, it’s only believed that the attackers have the encrypted vaults of LastPass users. However, that does mean they can attempt to “brute force” the encryption, trying any number of passwords as often as they like - and it seems some earlier versions of LastPass used rather poor choices with that cryptography, meaning the amount of effort needed to make an attempt is lower than other similar services (plus some users may have rather poor master passwords, making them easier to guess).

paulryanrogers 4y ago
Which is why it's strange to hear Steve Gibson so breathlessly defending LastPass, claiming secrets aren't really at risk. It's like he read some white papers, met some LP employees, and decided it's unhackable. Consider that many users may have had very guessable vault passwords, and encryption generally gets weaker as hardware and techniques advance.

lucideer 4y ago

> How is that complicated? I'm not saying for a moment that Lastpass are competent (there's plenty of evidence to the contrary), but... saying that this isn't complicated seems a bit much. This is an extremely complex set of transactions where many many things can be done incorrectly. There's also of course the general as-yet-not-conclusively-solved problem of non-reproducible builds / trusting remotely-updated code.

L_Rahman 4y ago

They did encrypt the vaults. The problem is that for accounts that were opened before 2017 the used an encryption algorithm that can be cracked with modern hardware. Not a typical desktop GPU, but someone with some firepower could pick an account and crack the master password in a reasonable length of time (on the order of weeks/months).

yreg 4y ago

Yeah, I don't consider my encrypted vault to be particularly sensitive. I guess someone could key log my master password on my device, copy my vault and pwn me everywhere. Also, when quantum computing becomes practical enough we password manager users might be in trouble, but surely in that case major changes in infosec would be needed regardless.

granddave 4y ago
This is where 2FA comes in to play.