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The real vulnerability with password managers is autoupdating browser extensions. That's the disaster on the horizon. They update on their own, all the time. Yo
by hendersoon 4y ago
The real vulnerability with password managers is autoupdating browser extensions. That's the disaster on the horizon. They update on their own, all the time. You can turn updates completely off but otherwise cannot control this behavior.
Eventually, a password manager's development environment will be compromised and bad actors will sneak a trojaned extension in, submitting it to Google and Mozilla and Microsoft and the rest. Your browser will update to that extension and the bad guys will get everything.
Self-hosting won't help, your homelab running vaultwarden in a docker container not exposed to the internet is no protection from this at all. 2FA won't help either when the extension itself is your enemy, it'll simply upload your entire unencrypted vault off to the bad guy on IRC or discord or whatever.
(2FA will help on individual sites supporting it, assuming you don't use your password manager to store 2FA tokens too. They all support that functionality, but you don't do that, right?)
The only way to avoid this outcome, which again is inevitable, it WILL happen eventually, is to laboriously copy/paste passwords from a separate password vault program that is not configured to autoupdate.
The thought of actually doing that makes me cringe, so I'm still using Bitwarden. I know it's coming, and hope it hits another more popular password vault first so everybody gets wise and figures out some solution to this problem. I also use Firefox which seems to have humans reviewing extensions, at least sometimes, and is less popular than Chrome.