3 ms·
> so your single point of failure is now just ONE password, the consequences of which would be that an attacker would have access to all of your passwords. Mos
by borski 2y ago
> so your single point of failure is now just ONE password, the consequences of which would be that an attacker would have access to all of your passwords.
Most managers have 2FA, or an offline key, to prevent this issue, and encrypt your passwords at rest so that without that key (and the password) the database is useless.
- nottorp 2y ago> and encrypt your passwords at rest I haven't turned off my desktop this year. How does encryption at rest help?
- doubled112 2y agoMy password manager locks when I lock my screen. You can configure it to lock after some time. The database is encrypted at rest.
- necovek 2y agoLocking is not sufficient: it would need to overwrite the memory where passwords were decrypted to. With virtual memory, this becomes harder.
- compootr 2y agoWhat's sufficient depends on your threat model. Normal dude in a secure office? An auto-locking password manager would suffice. Someone that should be concerned with passwords in-memory is someone who believes another has full physical access to their computer (and can, say, freeze RAM in nitrogen to extract passwords My largest concern would be an adversary snatching my phone while my password manager was actively opened
- necovek 2y agoLocking a password manager and your computer is certainly good enough in many cases. But gaining access to memory might not need the sophistication of using nitrogen (see eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMA_attack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMA_attack).
- freeone3000 2y agoBut still not particularly hard. mmap has a MMAP_FIXED flag for this particular reason — overwrite the arena you’re decrypting to, and you should be set.
- supertrope 2y agohttps://keepass.info/help/base/security.html#secmemprot https://keepass.info/help/base/security.html#secmemprot
- necovek 2y ago> On Unix-like systems, KeePass 2.x uses ChaCha20, because Mono does not provide any effective memory protection method. So only Windows seems to use secure memory protection.
- supertrope 2y agohttps://keepassxc.org/blog/2019-02-21-memory-security/ https://keepassxc.org/blog/2019-02-21-memory-security/
- necovek 2y agoOk, we seem to be moving the goalposts a bit. My point is that you need to read up on it to ensure the implementation of memory handling for your password manager is really safe. As you demonstrate yourself, KeePass has different clients with different memory protection profiles which also depends on the system.
- borski 2y agohttps://1passwordstatic.com/files/security/1password-white-paper.pdf https://1passwordstatic.com/files/security/1password-white-p...
- marshray 2y agoWhen your old hard drive turns up on ebay.
- nottorp 2y agoIt's not safe to sell SSDs is it? And even if it were, who would buy a used SSD with unknown durability gone?
- ziml77 2y agoIf the data was always encrypted, then simply discarding the keys effectively means the drive is left filled with random data. Also, NVMe drives can be sent the sanitize command which can erase/overwrite the data across the entire physical drive rather than just what's mapped into the logical view. I believe there's SATA commands to perform similar actions.
- justsomehnguy 2y ago> t's not safe to sell SSDs is it? Bitlocker (or anything comparable) makes it safe or ATA Secure Erase if you can issue it (not usable for the system drive most of the times) and check it afterwards. > And even if it were, who would buy a used SSD with unknown it doesn't worth it for $30 drive, for the multi-TB ones it's quite common, especially for the ssrver grade ones (look for the PM1723/PM1733)