[HN Gopher] What's in a PR statement: LastPass breach explained
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       What's in a PR statement: LastPass breach explained
        
       Author : saikatsg
       Score  : 387 points
       Date   : 2022-12-27 12:12 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (palant.info)
 (TXT) w3m dump (palant.info)
        
       | prepend wrote:
       | It would be interesting to hear people's life philosophy in this
       | area.
       | 
       | For me, lastpass always seemed like a bad idea as passwords are
       | very important to me and giving someone else a copy of my
       | passwords seems like a bad idea. Similarly, I don't let any
       | services know my bank passwords even if they super promise to
       | protect them and not misuse them.
       | 
       | Another similar seeming task that I can't delegate is to read my
       | bank statements and keep track of my assets and performance.
       | 
       | This isn't meant to shame people who are now at risk from
       | lastpass' failure, but to understand if HN readers have similar
       | personal habits and rules.
        
         | codexon wrote:
         | I would never put financial passwords in a cloud based password
         | manager. Even if they do everything perfectly encryption-wise,
         | no one can guarantee an attacker wouldn't alter the client-side
         | code to leak your master password.
         | 
         | Having said that, it is still useful for less important logins
         | like this website for example, where it isn't a big deal if
         | someone manages to use the account.
         | 
         | However it is a huge privacy issue if people know what accounts
         | you have. For example, I have a hackforums account and
         | pretended to be a normal user there while only using it to
         | scout attack vectors to patch. But to some people, they might
         | assume that I was partaking in actual hacking which is not the
         | case.
        
           | klabb3 wrote:
           | > I would never put financial passwords in a cloud based
           | password manager.
           | 
           | At this point any financial institution has 2FA, I think.
           | That still leaves say credit cards, but they are exposed
           | enough that you're not exactly making it worse even with a
           | terrible custodian like LastPass.
        
         | drbawb wrote:
         | It's a tradeoff based on convenience. I use Linux, Windows,
         | Android, and iOS on a daily basis; using some combination of
         | SyncThing, OneDrive, Google Workspaces, and iCloud. Getting an
         | offline-first PW manager to work correctly and consistently
         | across those devices, operating systems, and services is no
         | easy feat. Doubly so if you actually want proper integration
         | with the OS & browser keychain.
         | 
         | At some point the closest you'll get is a self-hosted BitWarden
         | instance, in which case you are basically running
         | LastPass/1Password/et al. yourself anyways. Then you have to
         | ask yourself (a) can you host it cheaper than a monthly
         | subscription of a competing service, and (b) can you maintain
         | that instance better _in your free time_ than some engineers
         | that get paid to do it every day?
         | 
         | The answer to (a) for me is definitely not, my colo bill is
         | much larger than a 1pass subscription, and (b) is also probably
         | a big fat no considering there were concerns in this article I
         | hadn't even thought of. So ultimately I'm happy paying a
         | nominal fee for someone to keep up w/ the ever changing
         | landscape of OS/browser integrations & minefield of security
         | pitfalls regarding credential storage.
         | 
         | I wish there was some elegant way to magically kept all my
         | devices in sync, that was portable & standardized, but the
         | reality is modern vendors seem more interested in creating
         | silos than standards.
         | 
         | ---
         | 
         | However there _are_ things I don 't put in my 1pass, despite it
         | having great support for them, because I consider the
         | alternatives more convenient or secure:
         | 
         | (1) My PGP/SSH keys are on a YubiKey
         | 
         | (2) My 2FA TOTP codes are on that YubiKey or some other
         | authenticator
         | 
         | (3) My 2FA backup codes are on an encrypted volume. That secret
         | is not stored in 1pass.
         | 
         | (4) My critical services (DNS, e-mail) require hardware backed
         | 2FA.
         | 
         | The theory being even if you steal my PW vault you can't own my
         | DNS, without my DNS you can't own my MX, and without my MX you
         | can't truly own my online identity.
        
         | TillE wrote:
         | > and giving someone else a copy of my passwords
         | 
         | Except you're not doing that. You're giving someone else an
         | encrypted blob.
         | 
         | The screwup here is that LastPass also stored a bunch of
         | unencrypted metadata.
        
       | mrstone wrote:
       | Incredibly pathetic. I am so disappointed in LastPass. I was
       | willing to forgive their subpar UX because hey, at least my
       | passwords were safe. I've moved over to Bitwarden and am happy
       | for now, but man what a shitshow.
        
         | dml2135 wrote:
         | Same, I held onto Lastpass much longer than I would have put up
         | with any less-essential SaaS product.
         | 
         | Finally moved to Bitwarden and couldn't be happier. Still
         | trying to decide if I want to self-host it or not, but more
         | breaches of cloud-based password managers like this one may
         | push me in that direction.
        
           | ok_dad wrote:
           | At least Bitwarden encrypts the whole vault as a blob. I
           | don't bother self-hosting because I figure I know less about
           | hosting a Bitwarden vault than they do so it's not much more
           | secure. If I had a local server on my LAN I might consider
           | it, because then at least I have a few firewalls between me
           | and the internet. I've been a happy paying Bitwarden user for
           | several years now, since just before the first "minor"
           | Lastpass breach.
        
             | hcurtiss wrote:
             | Yeah, I'm definitely not trained in security like the
             | password manager engineers are. But I keep wondering if
             | being distributed offsets that risk. That is, I can spin up
             | Bitwarden in my Unraid machine in like five minutes and
             | behind a reverse proxy, nobody even knows it's there to
             | attack. Maybe I have some security vulnerability, but it
             | seems significantly less likely to be tested than a
             | centralized commercial service. Curious if others have
             | thoughts. I'd happily pay Bitwarden for whatever.
        
               | ok_dad wrote:
               | I'm one of those software devs who don't do my own stuff,
               | I happily pay services for good products, but I know it
               | would be "better" security (probably) to have my own
               | server in-home and all that. I don't just choose
               | anything, but I don't want to deal with servers or
               | technology debugging outside of my day job. I used to run
               | my own servers and just got tired of having to maintain
               | them; and even "fully automated" systems need
               | maintenance.
        
         | libria wrote:
         | > disappointed in LastPass ... moved over to Bitwarden
         | 
         | Same as well, with an intermediate move to Dashlane. I want a
         | reliable, expensive password manager. It's not an easy problem
         | to solve, so if someone's trying to do it cheap, they'll get it
         | wrong. I wish Bitwarden would charge more, but they've proven
         | more secure than LastPass and the Android client is way more
         | reliable than Dashlane.
        
         | Nifty3929 wrote:
         | I love BitWarden, but coincidentally yesterday I saw a problem
         | pop up on Reddit that was terrifying: There is a known issue
         | where changing your master password can cause you to lose all
         | your data:
         | 
         | https://bitwarden.com/help/account-encryption-key/#rotate-yo...
         | 
         | What?!
         | 
         | Of course, if you are careful and follow all the instructions,
         | in theory you could avoid this. But why allow such a foot-gun?
        
           | aynawn wrote:
           | Agreed. It should at least log you out of all sessions
           | without you having to do it yourself. This is good to know if
           | I ever want to rotate my encryption key. Knowing this, I may
           | even log out of all sessions even if I was rotating my master
           | key.
        
           | klabb3 wrote:
           | > When you rotate an encryption key, you must immediately log
           | out of any logged-in sessions on Bitwarden client
           | applications (Desktop App, Browser Extension, Mobile App,
           | etc). [...]
           | 
           | > Making changes in a session with a "stale" encryption key
           | will cause data corruption that will make your data
           | unrecoverable.
           | 
           | I love Bitwarden but this is just... borderline hilarious.
           | Laughing nervously. God damn it, don't write a damn "help"
           | article about it, create a P0 bug, fix it asap and write a
           | post-mortem.
           | 
           | Field report: I tried to see this UX in action and while it
           | is indeed bad, there are some redeeming factors:
           | 
           | - By default, you don't rotate encryption key when you change
           | master password. This is opt-in. I'm not qualified to say
           | whether this is a good default or not.
           | 
           | - If you do, a full modal warning pops up explaining to log
           | out or wait an hour:
           | 
           | - They invalidate the sessions automatically, but this is
           | delayed.
           | 
           | AIUI you have to tick the box, not read the warning, hurry to
           | a different device and modify the vault, and have pissed off
           | the cache invalidation gods all at the same time to reach
           | corruption.
        
       | sydbarrett74 wrote:
       | A lot of people argue that a cloud provider has more expertise in
       | a given domain than a customer for whom IT isn't a core
       | competency. I reject this argument. What we have here is the
       | classic principal-agent problem in economics. Your data is (or
       | should be) sacred to you. LastPass's regard for your data is only
       | proportional to the profit they think they can extract from you.
       | Beyond that, they only answer to Citrix's shareholders. (Citrix,
       | or Shitrix as I call them, is ultimately the parent company.)
       | 
       | I swim against the prevailing current in believing that the cloud
       | should only serve as a backup, never as the primary solution.
        
       | SCLeo wrote:
       | >> The cloud storage service accessed by the threat actor is
       | physically separate from our production environment.
       | 
       | > Is that supposed to be reassuring, considering that the cloud
       | storage in question apparently had a copy of all the LastPass
       | data? Or is this maybe an attempt to shift the blame: "It wasn't
       | our servers that the data has been lifted from"?
       | 
       | Wow, seriously, they are really good at this. If not for this
       | explanation, I would totally thought only testing environment got
       | accessed.
        
       | nfca wrote:
       | In the case of something as critical as a password-manager,
       | quality of customer service, I believe, is a critical factor.
       | 
       | When there is a problem, how helpful is the customer service? If
       | not then a person stands to be locked out of critical aspects of
       | their digital life
        
         | fudgefactorfive wrote:
         | While having a Customer Service Rep tell you you're shit out of
         | luck if you can't remember your master password may suck, it's
         | pretty much the only way to actually be some semblance of safe.
         | 
         | The Mud-puddle test is to demonstrate that _only_ you can
         | access your services. If you can call and go  "hey can I get
         | back into my vault" so can anyone that convincingly can make
         | the same call on your behalf.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | weakfortress wrote:
       | I spent the holidays moving to a different provider (1password).
       | 1password's security posture is superior in almost every way and
       | it allows me to avoid having to worry about syncing keepass, etc
       | to my phone and 10 different computers. I still have hundreds of
       | passwords to change at this point.
       | 
       | I can't imagine LastPass is long for this world after this one.
       | Most other breaches were minor compared to this mess.
        
       | bberrry wrote:
       | My LastPass account literally had ONE iteration of pbkdf2
       | (https://i.imgur.com/34aIOzO.png) and it seems I'm not the only
       | one: https://snabelen.no/@vegardlarsen/109575002998425618
       | 
       | Absolutely amateurish. I hope no one trusts LastPass ever again..
       | I know I won't.
       | 
       | My account was registered 2010 if anyone is interested.
        
       | johndhi wrote:
       | The know it all tone of this article is kind of annoying.
       | Security professionals seem to have a common trait of thinking
       | they know better.
       | 
       | Some good points in there, but limited pragmatism.
        
         | mannykannot wrote:
         | I completely disagree. The article makes an extremely strong
         | case that the press release was designed to mislead people into
         | downplaying both the severity of the situation, and the depth
         | of incompetence at LastPass ( _both_ of which are matters of
         | considerable importance for all current and prospective
         | LastPass customers.) Attempting to mislead people is
         | considerably more serious than mere incompetence.
         | 
         | The best (if not only) way to make these points is to analyze
         | the PR statement itself. Any paraphrasing or generalization
         | would just give LastPass an opportunity to reply with more non-
         | sequiturs.
         | 
         | Dissembling circumlocution and omission is a feature of PR
         | communication, designed to mislead anyone who is not intimately
         | familiar with all the details. I would like to se more analysis
         | of this sort.
         | 
         | > Security professionals seem to have a common trait of
         | thinking they know better.
         | 
         | The author here _does_ know better than the people running
         | LastPass.
        
         | P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
         | I read it as frustration that they had been warned over and
         | over again and could have prevented this.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | i_am_toaster wrote:
         | I disagree, this article did not come off this way to me, as
         | all the comments were brief and backed up with supporting
         | materials. In addition, the usage of words that would convey
         | feelings the author had about the company were nonexistent --
         | they described the actions taken (or not taken) by the company
         | and left the reader to come to their own conclusions.
        
           | ncphil wrote:
           | Agreed. The tone was objective and factual. It's too bad the
           | owners of LastPass failed to heed the criticisms that
           | preceded this incident. FYI for anyone carping about LP's
           | legal liability here: read the disclaimers (and
           | indemnification agreement) in their TOS (personal or
           | business). It's a real howl, and pretty much software
           | industry standard.
        
         | rag-hav wrote:
         | Given author's apparent history with LastPass, the tone comes
         | across more as "told you so" to me.
        
         | palant wrote:
         | _Disclaimer_ : I am the author of this article.
         | 
         | What kind of pragmatism would you prefer? LastPass messed up
         | way more than they are willing to admit. And it's not like
         | nobody warned them before, quite a few of the issues which turn
         | out to be very problematic now aren't news - I brought them up
         | years ago as did others. LastPass should be warning users now
         | and suggesting mitigation steps, instead they claim that nobody
         | has a reason to worry.
        
           | dahart wrote:
           | This is a compelling article, I feel more motivated now to
           | reconsider my options. FWIW, my $0.02 feedback on pragmatism:
           | as a user, it would be nice to have more what-to-do-about-it
           | for non-security-experts. Also I didn't love the parts of the
           | article where you speculated about LastPass' motivations and
           | process (even if they turn out to be true!) The opening
           | paragraph is making assumptions about the timing, which could
           | backfire pretty badly if you're wrong. You also speculated
           | about the web site storing master passwords, justified by
           | saying "they absolutely could, and you wouldn't even notice."
           | They _could_ do a lot of things, including selling passwords
           | to the highest bidder. From my non-expert point of view, it'd
           | be more helpful  & pragmatic to stick to known facts and not
           | whip additional fear into what is most definitely a bad
           | situation.
        
             | hitekker wrote:
             | > which could backfire pretty badly if you're wrong
             | 
             | That's an odd take. Who could it backfire on? LastPass has
             | already fumbled their own response to this crisis. If not
             | him, others would speak up. If he's wrong, then he loses
             | credibility. The upside is that, if he's right, we're even
             | more aware that LastPass is not a company worth dealing
             | with.
        
             | mannykannot wrote:
             | The statement you objected to was used to demonstrate that
             | a specific claim by LastPass ("As a reminder, the master
             | password is never known to LastPass and is not stored or
             | maintained by LastPass") offers no guarantees that your
             | master password is known only to you. This, in turn, leads
             | to the conclusion that, even if you followed all of
             | LastPass's guidance on master password security, the
             | prudent thing would be to take some action - something that
             | LastPass explicitly denied later in the statement.
             | 
             | I'm sorry if you find this disturbing, but I do not see why
             | it should not be said.
        
             | palant wrote:
             | Thing is: this is the third article on the topic I wrote in
             | the past few days. Covering your options wasn't the goal
             | here, it's in the first article:
             | https://palant.info/2022/12/23/lastpass-has-been-breached-
             | wh.... Particularly the "executive summary" at the start.
             | 
             | As to the "speculations": I have sufficient experience with
             | LastPass press releases to assume the worst whenever they
             | omit details that they should definitely know. On a number
             | of occasions they covered security vulnerabilities that I
             | found, and I _know_ how they operate.
             | 
             | Mind you, I would be more than happy to learn that I'm
             | wrong. But this isn't a situation where "hope for the best"
             | is a viable approach.
             | 
             | Note: I did not claim that LastPass is storing master
             | passwords. _They_ claim that they built their system in a
             | way that they cannot. And I merely point out that this
             | isn't true: they _could_ have built their system in such a
             | way, but they chose not to, despite being warned about it
             | repeatedly.
        
       | alexpetralia wrote:
       | This vaguely reminds me of Rackspace's catastrophic failure a few
       | weeks ago.
       | 
       | Both companies were owned by private equity firms.
        
         | gausswho wrote:
         | I would love to have a service that cataloged all private
         | equity takeovers so that I could migrate away from them. Every
         | time they milk the brand and slowly atrophy.
        
       | ericmcer wrote:
       | Can someone point out a big flaw in my password management
       | system? I have always felt kinda dumb for not using a PW manager
       | but my system has worked for the last ~10+ years and I have never
       | had any issues.
       | 
       | I memorized a small function that takes the product name as input
       | and spits out a password. it achieves the goal of having a unique
       | pw for every service without having to write anything down (in
       | software or on paper). I had to amend it to account for some
       | services that require you to reset your password to a new one and
       | for sites with annoyingly specific password formats (i.e. 3
       | special chars).
        
         | IncRnd wrote:
         | > Can someone point out a big flaw in my password management
         | system?
         | 
         | The issue is that your passwords have almost zero entropy in
         | them. The only guard is that others don't know your secret
         | function. Password crackers are already programmed to handle
         | functional password composition. You might want to ask yourself
         | why pw crackers are programmed that way.
        
           | grogenaut wrote:
           | Taken in isolation they might have a ton of entropy, just not
           | taken across leaked password databases.
        
             | drexlspivey wrote:
             | If my password is hunter2#gmaildotcom for gmail what could
             | my reddit password be? It doesn't take many leaks to crack
             | the formula.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | darrenf wrote:
         | Not necessarily a huge flaw and indeed it's a method I used for
         | a long time too - but what it doesn't really help with is when
         | there's a breach and one of your passwords is in a leak. What
         | do you do: make (and remember) an exception and the second
         | choice function? Or change all your passwords so an amended
         | function still holds true for all sites? With a password
         | manager you just change the breached one and that's it.
        
         | robust-cactus wrote:
         | This is pretty cool, and could even make a great "no storage"
         | type product here. Hmm 1 problem could be forced password
         | changes? I've noticed some sites at times require password
         | changes.
        
           | drexlspivey wrote:
           | It's not, you can guess all his passwords if you know a
           | couple of existing passwords (maybe even 1)
        
         | snotrockets wrote:
         | I used to use a similar system
         | (http://crypto.stanford.edu/PwdHash/pwdhash.pdf), until I
         | realized it has a glaring issue when passwords need be rotated.
         | 
         | Assume a service you use was breached, and you have to replace
         | your password there. You can work around it by having another
         | input to your generator. Instead of (master password, service),
         | you now have (master password, service, version). Maybe you
         | append the version into one of the other arguments to keep the
         | function the same; doesn't matter: now there's a new, per-
         | service argument you have to track and remember.
        
         | deepserket wrote:
         | > function that takes the product name as input and spits out a
         | password
         | 
         | Can someone infer the function starting from the password and
         | the service name?
         | 
         | If yes, then there is a low (close to zero, unless you are
         | specifically targeted) possibility to gain a clear password
         | from a shitty website and calculate your other passwords.
        
         | grogenaut wrote:
         | Can't reuse a previous password is a great signal of what your
         | password actually is.
         | 
         | There are a lot of sites with dumb rules like can't be more
         | than 8 characters (old WSDOT toll rule) or can't have
         | symbols... So it doesn't always work.
        
         | flandish wrote:
         | What about when a product changes names, between your logins?
         | 
         | Take protonmail - they started to use "proton.me" instead of
         | "protonmail.com" more and more often. If your f(x) was
         | f("protonmail") originally but after being away six months you
         | try in the middle of the night while hungover and driving in
         | snow f("proton") won't get the same result?
        
         | temuze wrote:
         | I used to do a similar thing, then I realized it was a
         | potential problem.
         | 
         | Let's say you have an account at AcmeCo. Let's say AcmeCo has a
         | breach and I can see your password hash. Let's say the company
         | uses a weak password hash (e.g. MD5), or no salt and it's easy
         | to reference a rainbow table.
         | 
         | From this rainbow table, I can look up your hash and see that
         | your password is "lulzSecret2$AcmeCo".
         | 
         | Now let's say you're in another leak from BetaCo. Similar
         | situation -- I see that your password is "lulzSecret2$BetaCo2".
         | Maybe the two is because you were forced to rotate your
         | password once.
         | 
         | It doesn't take a genius to guess what your algorithm is.
         | 
         | But we can take it another level. Maybe I'll try all the major
         | banks and guess passwords using your algorithm
         | ("lulzSecret2$bofa", "lulzSecret2$chase"). Most banks require
         | 2fa, but most of the time they keep it to text-based 2fa.
         | 
         | If I know your phone number from one of the breaches (happens
         | all the time), maybe I can hijack your SIM card (this also
         | happens all the time) and boom, I'm into your bank account.
        
           | snotrockets wrote:
           | Assume the function is a cryptographically appropriate hash
           | function, you can reduce the risk of suggested attack to
           | almost nil, considering the number of inputs you'd need for
           | such attack
        
       | mdale wrote:
       | Shows the need for true multi factor. We should not have a bunch
       | of virtual MFAs and passwords in one service even if said service
       | make it convenient.
       | 
       | Password managers should be held to a high standard but we should
       | also never depend just on a password for protection of anything
       | of value.
        
         | user3939382 wrote:
         | Maybe before I die multiple YubiKey support can be considered a
         | standard. Even AWS doesn't support it which is just
         | unfathomable. They support one, so you can't have a backup, so
         | they may as well not have the feature.
        
           | anderiv wrote:
           | This is no longer the case as of late November 2022. You can
           | now assign multiple keys to both IAM users and root users.
           | 
           | https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/you-can-now-assign-
           | mul...
        
       | mrwww wrote:
       | And of course they have a new version where they are constantly
       | asking you to store credit cards and addresses, unless you dig
       | deep into the settings to disable those constant prompts.
        
       | Night_Thastus wrote:
       | I'm really curious what people in the know have to say about PM's
       | in general and what the good options are.
       | 
       | I personally really love having an in-browser password manager.
       | It's an incredible convenience and it lets every service have a
       | unique and nearly impossible to crack password.
       | 
       | I have far too many services to remember them all, and using the
       | same password for everything would be terrible.
       | 
       | But of course I see the risk of having "one password to rule them
       | all" and putting so much faith in one service. If it fails,
       | losing everything is possible.
       | 
       | I don't mind paying of course if there's a reason to, though for
       | now the free version of Bitwarden has been fine for years.
        
         | palant wrote:
         | Browsers' built-in password managers certainly have above
         | average quality, at least when used as a purely local solution.
         | A while ago I listed typical issues of the browser integration
         | in password managers, browser vendors have it all covered.
         | Except for #5 where they opted for convenience:
         | https://palant.info/2018/08/29/password-managers-please-make...
         | 
         | This doesn't mean that they are perfect. While Firefox allows
         | you to choose a master password for your local password
         | storage, even after improvements this is a very weak
         | protection: https://palant.info/2018/03/10/master-password-in-
         | firefox-or.... From what I remember, Chrome doesn't offer any
         | local protection whatsoever - if somebody manages to copy this
         | data off your computer it's gone.
         | 
         | More critical aspect is the sync functionality:
         | https://palant.info/2018/03/13/can-chrome-sync-or-firefox-
         | sy.... Following my report, Chrome Sync has been improved and
         | now offers reasonable protection at least for passwords -
         | assuming that you set a passphrase which isn't the default. In
         | principle, Firefox Sync is better because it always encrypts
         | all data, not merely passwords. But its bruteforce protection
         | is very weak, the bug report I link to is still unresolved. So
         | you would need a really strong password to protect the data
         | (ideally randomly generated).
        
         | edflsafoiewq wrote:
         | I have a small script that does hash(key + masterPasswd). key
         | is usually just the site's domain name. I have the script and a
         | few of the important passwords (eg my email) written down on
         | paper in case my drive dies. It works fine for me.
        
           | palant wrote:
           | You just exposed all your passwords to bruteforcing attacks.
           | Unless "hash" in this case is something like scrypt with sane
           | parameters.
           | 
           | Originally (before I started writing my own password manager)
           | I also thought that this is a safe method of password
           | generation. And then I realized that it isn't. Wrote about it
           | here: https://palant.info/2016/04/20/security-considerations-
           | for-p...
        
             | edflsafoiewq wrote:
             | Assuming you have the password and key, you'd need to brute
             | force hash and masterPasswd. Seems hard.
        
               | palant wrote:
               | It isn't. You certainly used MD5, SHA1, SHA256 or SHA512
               | as hash, with SHA256 being the most likely one. All of
               | these are very easy to bruteforce - if someone has one of
               | your passwords, bruteforcing your master password won't
               | take all too long.
        
       | nogridbag wrote:
       | Assuming I'm a LastPass user and I have a sufficiently long
       | master password with hardware based 2FA do I have anything to
       | worry about? The one weak link is mobile authentication which
       | bypasses 2FA. I honestly forget how that's configured.
        
         | Taywee wrote:
         | Maybe. Check your account's iterations like this:
         | https://support.lastpass.com/help/how-do-i-change-my-passwor...
         | 
         | If it's 5000, you've got 20 times as much to worry about than
         | if it's 100100.
         | 
         | 2FA won't help. That controls access, but not decryption, and
         | they've already got the encrypted data, so they're past needing
         | to get access.
         | 
         | To be safe, start resetting your most high-value passwords
         | immediately. Bank, email accounts, etc. Ideally, reset
         | everything.
        
         | foreverCarlos wrote:
         | A long password doesn't mean much by itself. If it has been
         | previously leaked in a different breach, reused, is relatively
         | easily brute-forced - then yes, you need to worry about that.
         | 
         | The bigger problem is: even if you are safe right now, your
         | vault is out there. If at any point your master password
         | surfaces somewhere - all your accounts are instantly
         | compromised. So the only sensible solution IMO is to start
         | rotating all passwords and usernames today.
        
           | rrauenza wrote:
           | To expand a little on your point - I don't think 2FA is
           | relevant once someone has your vault blob. 2FA only prevents
           | them from acquiring the blob.
        
         | alex- wrote:
         | I initially assumed I would be safe because of 2FA. Sadly it
         | looks like this is not the case, the second factor is used to
         | access the encrypted data, not decrypt the data. As the
         | attacker already has the encrypted data, they have bypassed the
         | stage where 2FA is providing protection. This appears to also
         | be the case for 1password and bitwarden, so not specifically a
         | lastpass failure.
        
           | mdaniel wrote:
           | > This appears to also be the case for 1password and
           | bitwarden, so not specifically a lastpass failure.
           | 
           | It is currently(?) the case for Bitwarden, yes, but that's
           | incorrect for 1Password, as they have client-only key
           | material that is never transmitted to the cloud:
           | https://blog.1password.com/what-the-secret-key-does/
        
             | alex- wrote:
             | Yes, a secret key like this _could_ have made this breach
             | much less concerning. Assuming you trust the company to not
             | also lose this data (that they generate and claim to not
             | store). What I was really hoping to find was a paid, cross
             | platform, cloud sync 'ed solution that can be setup to
             | require your password and physical key to decrypt. i.e.
             | have 2FA protection from a data breach like this.
        
               | mdaniel wrote:
               | There's nothing that I'm aware of preventing one from
               | putting the secret key material on a hardware wallet of
               | your comfort level and having it type in the encoded
               | value when signing onto a new device (the way the Yubikey
               | pretends to be a keyboard when plugged in); obviously(?)
               | 1Password is not incentivized to own such a complex
               | workflow but there's nothing that I can see stopping you
               | from doing it. FWIW they _also_ support 2FA on login,
               | which is different from the secret key to unlock the
               | vault, so ... 3FA?
               | 
               | With regard to the "claim not not store" part, they've
               | had multiple security audits including granting the
               | auditor access to the underlying source code, so if there
               | was something underhanded going on, I believe it would
               | have gotten out by now:
               | https://support.1password.com/security-assessments/
               | 
               | I'm with you that it's not as nice as open source
               | clients, but given a choice between trusting 1Password
               | with code I cannot see and trusting Bitwarden with code
               | that I can see, I'm sticking with 1Password
        
       | AlbertCory wrote:
       | A (perhaps) unconventional approach to password management, which
       | I recommend to anyone. If you enjoy complexity, this is too
       | simple for you.
       | 
       |  _No one can steal something that 's not written down_
       | 
       | Just like the Navajo code talkers in WW II had a system that was
       | memorized, so even if the Japanese captured another Navajo and
       | tortured him (which they did), he couldn't reveal the code.
       | 
       | Have some _hints_ to yourself, and store the hints. Even if the
       | file is stolen, the hints won 't help the thief. Never, never
       | store a "master key" of what all the hints mean. If you forget
       | one, just click the "forgot my password" link.
       | 
       | I'm not going to even hint at the hints :) I use.
        
         | maphew wrote:
         | This used to be my main approach, but now I only use it for
         | some key sites and rely on a password manager for the other
         | 90%. Why the change? Watching the mental deterioration of aging
         | on friends and family, and noting the beginnings of such things
         | in myself. My mind is so much slower than it used to be,
         | including recall. It's not only aging. A friend had a
         | concussion from a lousy picture frame falling off the wall. It
         | wasn't even that big or heavy. 3 years later still slowly
         | rebuilding mental and language function.
        
         | maphew wrote:
         | I forgot the other part of my reasoning: my hints only work for
         | me. If I am incapacitated in a way that affects my password
         | recall the hints won't mean shit to my family.
        
           | AlbertCory wrote:
           | You've hit on it:
           | 
           | The big advantage is, the hints are only meaningful to you.
           | 
           | The big disadvantage is, the hints are only meaningful to
           | you.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | pmlnr wrote:
       | Keepassxc + syncthing.
        
       | betaby wrote:
       | For non-tech-savvy people - https://www.amazon.ca/Password-Book-
       | Alphabetical-Colorful-Le...
       | 
       | For tech-savvy people - https://www.passwordstore.org/
       | 
       | The rest doesn't work unfortunately, proven over and over.
        
         | heresie-dabord wrote:
         | Debian (or any GNU/Linux) terminal:                   head -c
         | 256 /dev/random| openssl sha384 -binary | base64 | sed
         | 's/[=\/\\+]//g' | cut -b1-22
         | 
         | where "22" is the desired length of password.
        
         | sjaak wrote:
         | Happy user of passwordstore reporting in
        
         | neonsunset wrote:
         | Self-hosted instance of Bitwarden works pretty well, and you
         | can make it accessible behind a VPN to your local network only
         | (plus there are multiple implementations of its back-end).
         | Less-automated solutions make impractical concessions in
         | usability.
         | 
         | Reference impl. in C#: https://github.com/bitwarden/server
         | 
         | Self-host friendly impl. in Rust: https://github.com/dani-
         | garcia/vaultwarden
         | 
         | p.s.: reference implementation is by far one of the better
         | examples of how to do microservice-based C# solution of high
         | code quality right.
        
           | bertman wrote:
           | I always found running 12 containers for hosting a password
           | repository a bit overkill.
           | 
           | https://bitwarden.com/help/install-on-premise-linux/
        
             | neonsunset wrote:
             | Have you checked the second link? (emphasis on "self-hosted
             | friendly impl.").
             | 
             | The first one is obviously not designed to serve as a
             | primary self-hosted option but rather to scale for large
             | number of users.
        
               | bertman wrote:
               | Oh, I'm sure Vaultwarden is much more resource-friendly,
               | but even then:
               | 
               | a user's password list is arguably the most important
               | thing on the device.
               | 
               | And I'm not sure you need a "web interface" to something
               | that in the end is nothing more than an encrypted text
               | file, which is why I always recommend pass[0] or using
               | the browser's built-in pw manager for people that don't
               | know ssh and git.
               | 
               | [0] passwordstore.org
        
               | danShumway wrote:
               | For whatever it's worth, I think people should be a
               | little careful about using Pass. From their website:
               | 
               | > With pass, each password lives inside of a gpg
               | encrypted file whose filename is the title of the website
               | or resource that requires the password.
               | 
               | This is the exact problem that LastPass just got hit with
               | (okay, one of multiple problems) -- the vault doesn't
               | encrypt the URLs of the sites you visit. Pass is really
               | elegant, but it leaks a ton of metadata in pursuit of
               | that elegance. Tracking password changes unencrypted in
               | Git really seems like it's just asking for trouble.
               | 
               | Yeah, the actual passwords are encrypted and stay
               | encrypted, and that's great -- but we've just seen with
               | LastPass that it kind of matters that the entire vault be
               | encrypted. I personally think there are better ways to
               | get a CLI interface than exposing the site list.
        
               | bertman wrote:
               | Yep, I agree, valid criticism. There are things like git-
               | crypt, pass-tomb etc, but those can get messy real fast.
               | 
               | However, git repo != GitHub. Putting the repo on a home
               | server in the LAN has served me well over the years
        
       | 40four wrote:
       | I know password manger services are super convenient, and
       | probably worth the cost for most, especially non technical users.
       | But my preference has always been to manually manage my own local
       | KeyPass database.
       | 
       | Sure it's more cumbersome when it comes to syncing between
       | devices, but it's really not a big deal. One or twice a month I
       | will combine my DBs from all my devices ok one machine, use the
       | built in 'merge' functionality, and redistribute the I updated
       | DBs back out to each device. It might take 10 minutes.
       | 
       | But I can rest assured that I'm the only one who has a copy of my
       | DB/ key files, and a breach of _blank_pw_manager_ service can't
       | compromise my secrets. Highly recommend KeyPass. It's free and
       | open source, with high quality community ports available on every
       | platform. https://keepass.info/index.html
        
         | m101 wrote:
         | Why not use OneDrive to keep your files synced? That's what I
         | do with keepass
        
         | waboremo wrote:
         | Doesn't this create the same problem, albeit on a different
         | pain point? Now the service/methods you use to sync and store
         | your DBs are a problem without much benefit? I've seen people
         | use keepass and then google drive, which just seems silly at
         | that point if you're going to negate keepass' benefit (local
         | management) just to attempt to gain some of the benefits of
         | managed services like bitwarden in very clunky ways.
        
         | krsdcbl wrote:
         | I've actually ended up syncing my KeyPass db & sharing it with
         | my team via our own gitlab instance.
         | 
         | I'll have to pull changes if anybody added entries but: - Db
         | lies on our own encrypted servers instead of someone elses
         | cloud - access within the team is easily managed via ssh - I'll
         | have a commit stream telling me if anybody added sth and what -
         | can't easily fuck anything up in those shared records, have to
         | consciously commit changes - when we rotate master pw we clean
         | the repo
        
         | balaji1 wrote:
         | What about just using chrome's saved passwords and syncing?
         | 
         | It would be great if someone can succinctly destroy that idea
         | :D
        
           | monus21 wrote:
           | I use this and it's convenient but the fact that Google can
           | wipe out my entire digital identity on a whim scares me.
        
             | foreverCarlos wrote:
             | Google nuked an old email address of mine which was using a
             | custom domain (free Workspace account). That email
             | contained all my correspondence for a period of about 10
             | years. No way to restore it, no way to flag it to anyone at
             | Google. I have been slowly removing Google services from my
             | life, one of the last transitions being to Kagi.
        
             | balaji1 wrote:
             | That's always there. People rely on the google a lot. Have
             | apps in play Store, run YT channel. And other platforms
             | similarly have power over their user base.
        
           | balaji1 wrote:
           | More info about browser password management in
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34149738
        
           | ok_dad wrote:
           | Then you're stuck with Chrome forever. Same with Firefox or
           | Safari. I wish browser vendors would agree on one password
           | sharing protocol that's just some end-to-end encrypted blob
           | that you could download from any browser and unlock with your
           | password. You login to your Firefox or Google account, add
           | passwords, and if you want to use those from the other
           | browser you just get some http link that points to the
           | encrypted blob and then the other browser downloads the blob
           | and you unlock it with a password.
        
             | eshack94 wrote:
             | You can export your passwords as a CSV file and import to
             | other browsers (obviously if one chooses to do this, they
             | should delete this file securely after it's been imported).
             | 
             | Firefox, Chrome, and Edge also allow you to import
             | passwords between browsers natively. I'm not saying that I
             | recommend relying on the browser-based password manager
             | (personally I use KeePassX), but I wouldn't advise against
             | it for the reason you're describing. Just sharing some
             | info! Please let me know if I'm mistaken on any of this.
        
               | ok_dad wrote:
               | Sure, but if I have a Macbook with Safari and a Linux
               | workstation with Firefox and a Windows gaming PC with
               | Chrome, then I have to use a 3rd party service, right? I
               | don't mind that personally, I'm just an old man yelling
               | "You should have better interoperability between similar
               | competing software services!" at clouds (in the literal
               | and figurative sense).
        
               | lostlogin wrote:
               | Adding to this helpful comment:
               | 
               | Firefox doesn't allow you to import a CSV in its default
               | config. You need to enable it (it's straightforward) and
               | there is a guide here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-
               | US/questions/1328161
               | 
               | Then you can import to eg Safari to have it all in iCloud
               | Keychain.
        
         | dgrin91 wrote:
         | Here is my problem with KeyPass: its unclear to me how it deals
         | with emergency family access.
         | 
         | Last year my father unexpectedly passed away. All his stuff was
         | on lastpass. Thankfully we had emergency access setup, and I
         | was able to get into all his accounts 2 days later. It was an
         | exceptionally important part of the transition phase, and
         | without it we would have experienced significant financial
         | harm.
         | 
         | How would KeyPass deal with the same type of situation?
        
           | simoncion wrote:
           | > How would KeyPass deal with the same type of situation?
           | 
           | You give someone a copy of your password, your key file (that
           | is, your long-ass password), or both, if both are required.
           | 
           | If you want to duplicate the "Give people time to refuse the
           | request for access" part of LastPass's feature, then retain a
           | lawyer to hold the copies for you and -after receiving a
           | request for them- release them after an agreed-upon period of
           | time (or if they get a proper death certificate or whatever).
        
           | the8472 wrote:
           | If one uses an offline password manager then you want the
           | stored passwords to be approximately as secure as memorized
           | passwords. So how do you deal with emergency family access to
           | memorized information in the deceased person's brain? Same
           | deal.
        
           | 40four wrote:
           | Fair question, but since it's not a service, I don't see how
           | that is KeePass' responsibility. But, It's really just a
           | simple as making sure your dependents have a copy of your
           | master password. If I remember correctly, the native Windows
           | version has a step to print of a sheet to share with family
           | members when you create a new database (I could be wrong,
           | it's been a while). Either way it would be trivial to type up
           | a word document to print off. If you use a key file as well,
           | it a little more complicated. Depends on if you're assuming
           | folks have access to your machine or not. As someone else
           | suggested, a thumb drive could be a good solution. Whatever
           | you choose they need to have a copy of the DB file, master
           | pass, and key file and you're good :)
        
           | kilolima wrote:
           | With KeePass, the trivial solution for this situation could
           | just be a second subset database of relevant accounts on a
           | thumb drive, with the password known to family individuals.
           | That seems easier than relying on a cloud provider and some
           | sort of half-baked insecure emergency access mode.
        
             | SamuelAdams wrote:
             | FYI, thumb drives die. The longest I've hand one work was
             | about 7 years, more recent thumb drives tend to only last
             | 3-4 years.
             | 
             | For longevity a CD / DVD might last longer, but even then
             | those are 30 years on average.
        
               | wazoox wrote:
               | I still have my first 128MB thumb drive, bought in 2001
               | or so. Works fine. Holds a kdbx file fine :)
        
               | davidjfelix wrote:
               | I'm not really sure how this anecdote is relevant. Are
               | you denying that flash drives fail? Are you endorsing not
               | having a backup plan?
               | 
               | Just to offer a counter anecdote, I had a flash drive
               | fail with my kdbx file on it and it was a monumental pain
               | in the ass to recover from because I didn't have backups.
               | Have backups. Especially for critical passwords that lock
               | you out of everything. Flash drives do fail. Statistical
               | failures SPECIFICALLY mean that some people will not
               | fail, but that doesn't mean failures don't happen or that
               | they're unlikely/uncommon.
        
           | Beaver117 wrote:
           | Excuse me if this seems impolite, but is there a reason you
           | need his passwords? Financial institutions have a very
           | regulated pipeline for access of deceased accounts to
           | relatives. And for personal email and stuff, well I think
           | that should remain private unless the deceased explicitly
           | wanted to share.
        
             | blagie wrote:
             | This is a place with significant cultural differences.
             | 
             | I can't imagine my parents wanting me to be locked out, and
             | I can't imagine wanting my children to be locked out.
             | Things like personal correspondence usually stop being
             | private once someone is deceased, and indeed, are one of
             | the few ways to get you know your ancestors.
             | 
             | I'm not American by birth, but I've lived in America long
             | enough to understand both values. I don't think either way
             | is better, but this strong emphasis on privacy (with
             | family) is a very Western phenomenon. In most places,
             | families have far fewer internal secrets.
             | 
             | What's especially odd is how much more Google and other
             | corporations are allowed to know about Americans than
             | families. For me, it's backwards.
        
             | UncleMeat wrote:
             | One of my parents neighbors died suddenly of Covid. She ran
             | a small business as a vacation planner. Her husband did not
             | have her email password. This was a huge pain and a source
             | of stress when he was arranging the funeral because he was
             | unable to inform people who expected her to be managing
             | their upcoming vacation that she died. Sometimes timely
             | access is valuable.
        
             | CJefferson wrote:
             | Having going through this experience, there is often lots
             | of little things. Maybe there was a shared domain
             | registered to your email account. Closing or moving
             | Netflix, or Disney+, or your vegetable subscription
             | service, is much easier if you can just log in and close
             | the account -- this can be done by writing to the
             | companies, or if you just stop paying and responding, but
             | everything is just easier with email access.
        
             | justsomehnguy wrote:
             | Where I live it could take months (or even years if thr
             | heirs of a deceased doesn't agree on the terms) to have the
             | access to the money. It would be quite illegal to knowingly
             | use the money of a deceased person, but things happens.
        
             | dgrin91 wrote:
             | Transferring financial accounts I found out to be a very
             | difficult and time consuming process. In some cases it was
             | just flat out not possible even though I had everything I
             | needed. I was shocked by how bad it was.
             | 
             | Other things were also required. E.g. my father had a small
             | business. It was big enough that it had real income and we
             | wanted to keep it going, but not big enough that there was
             | tons of redundancy for this type of event. Without having
             | his passwords the business would have ground to a halt in 2
             | weeks (payroll). Add to that all sorts of business accounts
             | (domains, mail, accounting, etc, etc) and having this
             | emergency access turned out to be the key to keeping things
             | going.
             | 
             | Even his personal email - he would have wanted us to have
             | access, but how does he give access without just giving us
             | his PW? Turned out that emergency access was the perfect
             | solution.
        
           | krsdcbl wrote:
           | With KeePass you'll have to manage said emergency access.
           | Either by sharing that master pw directly or maybe if it
           | concerns business matters by keeping those records in an own
           | db and employ a notary to manage such emergency access.
           | 
           | Anyway even delegating it to a notary imho isn't near as much
           | of a possible security issue than having an SaaS store all
           | your auths online & them having a system in place to grant
           | third party access.
        
           | Nullabillity wrote:
           | That sounds like a huge anti-feature to me. The few services
           | that a next-of-kin should realistically need access to
           | (banking and... that's pretty much it) will already have a
           | process in place for handling this.
           | 
           | The rest of my accounts should die when I do.
        
             | SamuelAdams wrote:
             | Yes, most services have a "death process" that typically
             | involves the next of kin sending the death certificate and
             | some type of document confirming they are in charge of the
             | deceased's estate. They might then set you up with your own
             | login, or send you paper copies of all the info you need to
             | an email account or mailing address.
        
             | irrational wrote:
             | All of our family pictures and videos are in a place that
             | only I have the password to. If anyone wants anything, they
             | come to me. That is another password I would want passed
             | on. I also pay all the bills. My wife would need access to
             | all of the utility accounts, the mortgage payment account,
             | the credit card accounts, the insurance accounts, the
             | retirement fund accounts, etc. There is way more than just
             | banking.
        
               | Nullabillity wrote:
               | But those are things that are worth solving _now_, not
               | just once you die.
        
             | dgrin91 wrote:
             | I used to think that, but then reality struck.
             | 
             | For the financial companies, the process varied greatly by
             | company. Some were OK, others were terrible, some flat out
             | didn't work. The bottom line is that this isn't a super
             | common business flow for them and its not something they
             | make money on, so it gets very little attention. When you
             | actually need to go through it you realize its a very
             | difficult process.
             | 
             | Oh and it always takes a LONG time, even with the better
             | companies. Easily months to get everything fully done.
        
           | janalsncm wrote:
           | Print password and detailed access instructions. Put
           | instructions in safe deposit box. Allocate access to safe
           | deposit box in your will.
           | 
           | Emergency access is a human problem. Seeking a technical
           | solution to a human problem is just asking for trouble. This
           | is why lawyers and customer service will always be necessary.
        
           | tyfon wrote:
           | My wife and I have the password to our vaults in each others
           | vaults, however I am not sure what would happen if both of us
           | die.
           | 
           | Edit: as a site note, have used keepass + file on my (vpn
           | reachable) synology for like 10 years, never had any issues.
           | I use it in linux, android, ios and windows.
        
           | rietta wrote:
           | Have to plan ahead and have the keypass password in an
           | envelope in the safe deposit box.
        
             | linuxlizard wrote:
             | Yes. I do this. I have all my financial account numbers and
             | passwords written on a piece of paper stored in my safe
             | deposit box. If anything happens to me (knocks wood), my
             | family will still be ok.
        
             | WretchedEarl wrote:
             | Something to be aware of regarding safe deposit boxes:
             | possession of the key does not automatically grant access
             | to the box.
             | 
             | The bank I use maintains a list of people I allow to access
             | my box along with their physical signature. When I needed
             | to access my box, I had to sign in with a pen, on paper and
             | show my ID. They compared that signature with the one I
             | gave when I first obtained the box. I was granted access if
             | they matched. If someone else came in with the key but
             | their name wasn't on the bank's list or the signature
             | didn't match, they wouldn't allow access to the box.
             | 
             | So make sure people you want to be able to access the box
             | are on that list (which means they will have to go to the
             | bank to provide a signature ahead of time.)
        
               | dangoor wrote:
               | To add to this: if someone is not on that access list but
               | is instead listed in a will, my understanding is that the
               | will has to go through probate before access to the box
               | is granted. It's quite likely that people would want/need
               | access to passwords before that.
        
             | irrational wrote:
             | What else is in your self deposit box? I thought only rich
             | people with gold and jewels and spies with fake passports
             | and ready currency used safe deposit boxes.
        
               | wmeredith wrote:
               | I'm middle class. We have a safe deposit box where I keep
               | stuff that would be a pain in my ass to replace in the
               | event of a fire/flood/etc.
               | 
               | Said items are titles to my vehicles and home, my
               | marriage license, the will of a family member I've been
               | entrusted with, birth certificates for my self and family
               | members, and a couple of keepsakes for the kids that I'm
               | very long on. It only costs me about $80 per year, and it
               | brings me a lot of peace of mind. I have photocopies of
               | all those docs at home, because you rarely need the real
               | thing.
        
               | NikolaNovak wrote:
               | When we first immigrated to Canada my family kept some of
               | our documents such as birth records etc. It was super
               | cheap and my family felt security was beneficial.
               | 
               | I don't have one currently but perhaps I should.
        
               | drexlspivey wrote:
               | Most people in here are rich.
        
           | counttheforks wrote:
           | It's KeePass, not KeyPass. And it's designed to be secure. If
           | you want emergency access, tell someone your master password.
        
           | dkarl wrote:
           | This is the reason I went with LastPass, because they have a
           | feature designed and designated for recovery after death,
           | with support, and 1Password would require me explaining to my
           | family how they would use the emergency kit after I died, and
           | they would likely 1) be pissed at being asked to understand
           | it, and 2) not even try it after I died, and suffer all the
           | inconvenience of not having access to my accounts.
           | 
           | It's frustrating, but the fact that 1Password's emergency kit
           | is primarily intended and documented for me to use, and
           | incidentally happens to enable account recovery for my heirs
           | as well, means that they won't use it. One look at the
           | documentation and they'll write it off as techie stuff that I
           | was into that they won't be able to understand. With
           | LastPass, there's stuff online specifically explaining that
           | it's intended to provide access for family members in case of
           | death, and I think that is reassuring enough that they'll
           | stick with the process until they figure it out.
        
             | roblabla wrote:
             | > 1) be pissed at being asked to understand it, and 2) not
             | even try it after I died, and suffer all the inconvenience
             | of not having access to my accounts.
             | 
             | Your family sounds fun to be around.
             | 
             | 1Password emergency kit is pretty well-designed, all things
             | considered. It's a neat, single-page PDF with all the
             | necessary information[0] (URL to login, email
             | address/password, and the security key as text or QR Code
             | for easy setup). I guess a link to a sort of tutorial/guide
             | of how to use it to recover the account would be a welcome
             | addition, but I find the format to be pretty solid.
             | 
             | It's pretty hard to find information on lastpass version of
             | the feature. What does it look like? According to their
             | documentation of the "Emergency Access" feature, it claims
             | to be a one-time access[1]? What happens after that access,
             | do you just lose your access forever? That seems much worse
             | than the 1password emergency kit!
             | 
             | [0]: https://i.1password.com/media/1password-emergency-
             | kit.png [1]: https://www.lastpass.com/features/emergency-
             | access
        
           | insanitybit wrote:
           | Write the password on a piece of paper. Give it to your bank
           | and/or lawyer.
        
           | rkagerer wrote:
           | One option (albeit not the simplest): Shamir shares + a few
           | trusted individuals or locations (eg. family, lawyer, safe) +
           | "in the event of my death" instructions enclosed with your
           | will.
        
         | wazoox wrote:
         | I've been using Dropbox, then Nextcloud to keep the database
         | synchronized on all my devices for years and years. Absolutely
         | no problem at all, and dead simple.
        
         | didntreadarticl wrote:
         | I always struggled to find a decent Keepass implementation for
         | my friend who uses Macs. Any recommendations?
        
           | mdaniel wrote:
           | KeePassXC is excellent on macOS:
           | https://keepassxc.org/download/#mac
        
       | sufficient wrote:
       | I think we can do better in protecting vaults against offline
       | brute force attacks.
       | 
       | As written in the this post, 1Password uses a randomly generated
       | "secret key" together with the user-chosen master password. This
       | "secret key" is not stored on 1Password's servers, instead it
       | should be printed on a piece of paper and stored safely. While
       | this is a good starting point, it significantly reduces
       | usability, since you need this piece of paper when re-installing
       | 1Password.
       | 
       | At heylogin, we are rethinking this cryptographic design. In our
       | case, a random secret is generated inside the smartphone's
       | security chip. From this secret, all keys for encryption are
       | derived. The smartphone app and the browser extension is end-to-
       | end encrypted and authenticated using an out-of-band QR code.
       | This results in the following UX: To log into a website in the
       | browser, the user needs to confirm on the phone. The app now
       | provides the extension with temporary access to the passwords etc
       | (a little bit more complicated to explain here).
       | 
       | Thus, if the same breach would happen to us, the vaults would
       | still be secure, since the e2ee does not depend on a user chosen
       | master password.
       | 
       | It's not easy to get a foot in this market, but I am confident,
       | we can do it.
        
         | mdaniel wrote:
         | > since the e2ee does not depend on a user chosen master
         | password.
         | 
         | What's the story with "my phone went in the lake" using that
         | setup?
        
           | isthisthingon99 wrote:
           | Since i use Google Authenticator for numerous services this
           | is going to happen to me one day. So what I did was set it up
           | on more than one phone.
        
             | mdaniel wrote:
             | I would legit pay money for Google to pull that piece of
             | junk from the Play Store, because it's damn malpractice at
             | this point, given there are so many other options that
             | don't straight-up swallow the TOTP keys
        
               | isthisthingon99 wrote:
               | Sorry what
        
             | ThrowawayTestr wrote:
             | I also have two phones with Google Authenticator. Is that a
             | bad idea?
        
             | FreakLegion wrote:
             | You can back the secrets up to a text file, print them out,
             | etc. too. They're short Base32 strings and TOTP is a
             | standardized protocol with an RFC (6238) and everything.
        
               | isthisthingon99 wrote:
               | Yes i did this too
        
           | 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
           | fish it out of the lake and pay someone $1000 to extract the
           | tpm and restore it for you
        
           | sufficient wrote:
           | Just wrote a longer answer to the question below, hope that
           | covers your question as well.
        
         | paulryanrogers wrote:
         | What does migration look like for a new device?
         | 
         | If a phone is lost and it's TPM compromised would that put all
         | future credentials at risk?
         | 
         | Most of the derived ideas strike me foolish since they
         | compromise future and past. And they accrue state anyway once
         | one must rotate keys.
        
           | sufficient wrote:
           | You are asking the right & also complicated questions :)
           | 
           | Let me first say that we are just finishing up a version 2 of
           | our whitepaper that can answer all questions regarding the
           | cryptographic architecture including these scenarios. We'll
           | announce that in the next 2-4 weeks when it's ready.
           | 
           | There are different scenarios here:
           | 
           | * If you install heylogin on a new phone, you will get asked
           | to transfer your account to the new one. If you confirm,
           | everything is cleared on the old phone, secrets are
           | regenerated and date is re-encrypted.
           | 
           | * If you are using the team features of heylogin, your admin
           | can disable your old phone (even if it's broken) and you can
           | connect a new one with the help of the admin. The secrets are
           | re-generated and data is re-encrypted. The underlying
           | architecture is a little bit more difficult here and will be
           | explained in the whitepaper.
           | 
           | * You can write down a backup code and use this for recovery
           | (I like this method the least)
           | 
           | * We'll soon have a feature where you can add a security key
           | as another method of accessing your data. This will also help
           | in re-gaining access if the phone is lost.
           | 
           | * We'll also probably have a "social recovery" in the future,
           | similar to the admin recovery flow but for private users.
           | 
           | Internally, we have more ideas to provide transfer & recovery
           | flows. We'll keep on experimenting.
           | 
           | Since secrets are re-generated and data is re-encrypted, even
           | if the old phone is broken, the TMP no longer holds secrets
           | that are usable to decrypt the data.
           | 
           | Does this answer your question?
        
         | wkdneidbwf wrote:
         | > This "secret key" is not stored on 1Password's servers,
         | instead it should be printed on a piece of paper and stored
         | safely. While this is a good starting point, it significantly
         | reduces usability, since you need this piece of paper when re-
         | installing 1Password.
         | 
         | you can bootstrap from an existing installation too. you're
         | painting this to be more of a hassle than it actually is in
         | practice.
        
           | sufficient wrote:
           | maybe... I sort of agree it's not a huge hassle when
           | recovering from another still functional 1Password
           | installation. I still think that the initial flow of asking
           | the user to print something that looks complicated is
           | something that turns away users who are less IT-savvy.
        
       | xfz wrote:
       | Thankfully their UX is awful, which prompted me to switch to
       | 1Password. It feels like they're milking a cash cow rather than
       | trying to improve the product.
        
       | bikeformind wrote:
       | Catastrophic breach after catastrophic breach since 2011.
       | Lastpass has failed their fiduciary duty as a steward of
       | sensitive information and IMO exhibited gross negligence in not
       | encrypting URI data, ostensibly as a trade off for consumer
       | functionality.
       | 
       | not to be overly vindictive, as I understand the near
       | impossibility of running a perfectly secure service at absolutely
       | enormous scale...but does anyone else feel LastPass should shut
       | down the businesses, refund customers, and help them migrate to a
       | new service? You are just not the organization for this job.
        
         | sydbarrett74 wrote:
         | You're not being vindictive. If anything, you're being overly
         | gracious.
        
         | stainablesteel wrote:
         | in one regard i'm with this and i do want them to have a
         | fiduciary like responsibility
         | 
         | on the other hand i almost see this as similar to the groups of
         | people who swarm towards televangelists, who sign up to donate
         | their last dollar to a millionaire who's scamming them for
         | everything they're worth
         | 
         | if you trust it, then maybe falling for it is the best thing
         | for you, to learn this lesson the hard way :/
        
         | hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
         | I think the whole LastPass fiasco just shows why everyone wants
         | to get into the SaaS business so bad - subscription revenue is
         | the gift that keeps on giving.
         | 
         | LastPass has proven they have no business safekeeping anyone
         | else's credentials. Anyone who cares a modicum about their
         | security will have migrated off. But migrating off is a HUGE
         | pain (people will need hours to update hundreds of passwords),
         | and LastPass's announcement just days before Christmas was
         | obviously done so that your average Joe would just miss it.
         | 
         | So LastPass will be able to continue collecting subscription
         | revenue from users who were too busy or just not paying
         | attention to the news, despite the fact that they really should
         | be giving refunds to everyone who depended on their service.
        
           | adornedCupcake wrote:
           | > But migrating off is a HUGE pain
           | 
           | It took less than 10mn to migrate to Bitwarden. What do you
           | mean by migrate?
        
             | bentcorner wrote:
             | Moving passwords managers is easy, but if you assume
             | LastPass lost your passwords you need to change every
             | password.
        
               | coffeefirst wrote:
               | In theory yes, but the risk associated every account is
               | not equal.
        
               | smcin wrote:
               | But that isn't migrating, it's "changing all your
               | passwords on all sites you use".
               | 
               | Even if you stayed on LastPass(!), you should still do
               | that, right? It's a penalty for LastPass compromising
               | them.
        
             | brian_cunnie wrote:
             | If you have an business account, migration is non-trivial:
             | It's not uncommon to have hundreds of shared folders of
             | secrets accessible by hundreds of teams.
             | 
             | The meta information (which user account belongs to which
             | team, which team has what kind of access {none,read-
             | only,read-write} to which folder) is not trivial to
             | migrate.
        
             | rhamzeh wrote:
             | Last time I migrated (many years ago), not all the data was
             | in the export. And the secure notes especially were mostly
             | missing or messed up.
             | 
             | I think others have posted on HN that they experienced the
             | same last year when they attempted to migtate.
             | 
             | So you may have exported in 10m, but do not assume you got
             | everything, go through the list and make sure everything is
             | there (including verifying the contents).
        
           | Flimm wrote:
           | Migrating from LastPass to another password manager is
           | actually a pretty easy process. Many password managers can
           | import passwords from LastPass.
        
             | tasuki wrote:
             | Yes, sure that's easy. Also now there are twice as many
             | places from which an attacker can get your passwords. Oops?
        
               | manmal wrote:
               | Have you read the 1Password whitepaper? This isn't
               | exactly an easy target for any attacker.
        
               | hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
               | I haven't read the 1Password whitepaper, could you
               | elaborate? Would be curious what 1P is doing that is
               | substantially more secure than what LP is doing (not
               | counting the braindead stuff like not encrypting website
               | URLs) Having been a 1P _user_ , my guess is that, unlike
               | LastPass, in 1P the data used to encrypt your vault
               | includes both a completely random key and your master
               | password, while in LastPass it's just your master
               | password. Is there anything else?
        
             | tsimionescu wrote:
             | That's useless if you're migrating away because of security
             | concerns. What you actually have to do is to go to all of
             | the sites and change each of the passwords you have stored
             | in LastPass.
        
               | philjohn wrote:
               | As someone else - you should be doing this even if you're
               | staying on lastpass.
               | 
               | It's what I've spent the last few days doing (hundreds of
               | passwords), but then again, I'm also moving to bitwarden.
        
               | tsimionescu wrote:
               | True, though I think this is a good practice in general
               | if switching your password manager, even for benign
               | reasons (price etc).
        
         | mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
         | More interesting to me is that this shouldn't be an issue, they
         | should just lose out to the competition organically.
         | 
         | And yet here we are.
        
           | therealdrag0 wrote:
           | Competition is slow to take effect when there is cost of
           | transition.
        
           | mhneu wrote:
           | Duopoly. Plus cost of switching away once you sign up.
           | 
           | Network effects and monopolistic (anti-competitive) features
           | allow bad companies to survive today. Monopolistic practices
           | are probably a worse problem today than in the 1920s.
           | 
           | In the 1920s governments used regulation to break up huge
           | firms and defeat advantages due to cost of capital (hard to
           | start a new railroad in the 20s because the cost of trains
           | and tracks was just so high.) Today, cost of capital is
           | relatively less important, and things like switching cost and
           | bundling and people valuing their time and convenience are
           | bigger factors. We need anti-trust/government regulation to
           | address those.
           | 
           | (For example, in the case of password managers, imagine if
           | there were laws requiring publicized security audits and
           | seamless migration to a new service of customer's choice. A
           | competitor to Lastpass might have arrived by now.
        
             | akerl_ wrote:
             | All major browsers offer password management, then there's
             | Apple Keychain, 1Password, KeePass, Bitwarden, and
             | Lastpass. And that's just the ones I could think about
             | while reading your comment.
             | 
             | Where is the the duopoly, and who's being forced out of the
             | marketplace due to lack of government regulation of
             | password managers?
        
             | hackernewds wrote:
             | Much of this could be addressed by antitrust enforcement as
             | well as actually having competent lawmakers that understand
             | the products their citizens use overwhelmingly daily.
             | Policymakers barely understand the internet, let alone zero
             | knowledge architecture and encryption
             | 
             | Sundar Pichai being asked about if someone is handpicking
             | search results comes to mind, as an illustration
        
           | comte7092 wrote:
           | Most economic models of equilibrium explicitly state that
           | they model outcomes "in the long run" for precisely this type
           | of a circumstance.
           | 
           | Should a firm with a history of these types of problems lose
           | out to competition organically? Sure, but there is no binary
           | "losing out tot he competition" switch that just gets flipped
           | one day.
           | 
           | This is part of the reason why I get so frustrated with the
           | laissez faire mindset/meme.
        
             | mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
             | Right.
             | 
             | Crucially, these models don't actually state that the
             | companies that do the best job will win out, but that the
             | most profitable ones do.
             | 
             | The problem arises when screwing over the user is more
             | profitable than doing it properly.
             | 
             | That's why the tech industry is so ethically corrupt today.
             | There's very little regulation to make dark patterns and
             | sloppy security practices more costly than they are
             | profitable.
        
         | foreverCarlos wrote:
         | I feel this way but this is wishful thinking. It's more likely
         | that they will transition even more into a gray privacy
         | territory by marketing LastPass to less and less tech-savvy
         | users, eventually bundling it for free with some spammy ad-
         | supported service and/or preinstalled on a phone or laptop
         | (basically, Norton and McAfee territory). The parent company is
         | already not trustworthy, and this breach is the last nail into
         | LastPass as a trustworthy service.
        
         | folkhack wrote:
         | > Lastpass has failed their fiduciary duty
         | 
         | I get where you're coming from, and ultimately agree. But I
         | doubt anyone at LastPass on the business side agrees - to them
         | this is just another PR snafu. The business continues to chug
         | along regardless of how many catastrophic breaches they go
         | through. I think they see these numerous issues as a cost of
         | doing business vs. having a critical broken product offering.
         | 
         | Again I agree, but, I doubt they're going to change their ways
         | this late in the game.
        
         | leni536 wrote:
         | They could might as well dissolve the whole company. Most, if
         | not all of their products are very security sensitive.
        
           | otachack wrote:
           | Aa long as they have paying customers that are ignorant,
           | willing or not, to the issues I suspect they'll keep chugging
           | along.
        
       | tex0 wrote:
       | Why did people think that using a cloud based password manager
       | (or for that matter: a closed source one) was ever a good idea?
        
         | dml2135 wrote:
         | Because there needs to be a baseline level of convenience in
         | order to get less-technical people to even consider using a
         | password manager at all.
         | 
         | If the alternative is using the same handful of weak passwords
         | for every site, the risk of your password manager suffering a
         | security breach doesn't look so bad in comparison.
        
           | wlll wrote:
           | There is a pretty large gap between "cloud based password
           | storage" and "using the same password for each site".
           | 
           | 1Password for /years/ worked with a local vault (and no
           | remote sign-in requirement), and had relatively simple
           | syncing to iOS via wifi (no idea on other OSes, that's what I
           | use).
           | 
           | I've shared my password vault between these two places with
           | no issues and it didn't need a cloud account and I wasn't re-
           | using passwords.
        
             | Espressosaurus wrote:
             | That's literally the option though if you've managed to
             | convince someone to use a password manager.
             | 
             | I convinced a family member and their response to the
             | breach was "okay, who should I use instead? Or do I go back
             | to using one password for everything?"
        
               | wlll wrote:
               | "okay, who should I use instead? Or do I go back to using
               | one password for everything?"
               | 
               | Given that the "using one password for everything" is
               | such a terrible idea that we can discount as probably
               | worse than storing your passwords in a cloud-based vault
               | then you land on what your family member has given you as
               | the other option "what should I use instead".
               | 
               | Ultimately if* there are no password managers available
               | that will do syncing of locally stored vaults, then there
               | are actually multiple options here:
               | 
               | 1. Accept that the convenience (of device sync) here
               | trumps the security issue that storing passwords in a
               | cloud based vault causes.
               | 
               | 2. Should there be no options that allow for device sync
               | /and/ local-only vaults then there is another option
               | which is to not do automatic syncing.
               | 
               | Option 2. is somewhat inconvenient (how much depends on
               | who you are and what you do), but it is still an option.
               | 
               | Personally, Option 1. is a line I'm not willing to cross.
               | I see single repositories of 10s to 100s of thousands of
               | peoples passwords as a "password pinata", a massive
               | target for attack and so I'd take the inconvenience over
               | the compromise. That said I'm lucky to have a 1Password 7
               | still so do have local vaults and sync, but there's not a
               | chance in hell I'm uploading this stuff to a central
               | repo.
               | 
               | * Enpass might do what you want. It was a suggestion in
               | the comment thread here.
        
               | Espressosaurus wrote:
               | I'm not concerned for _me_ , I'm concerned with what less
               | sophisticated people are willing to put up with.
               | 
               | Our options are convenience of device sync or one
               | password.
               | 
               | Or some other mechanism, because I have been told in no
               | uncertain terms that's as far as it goes.
               | 
               | I can't even convince this family member to rotate their
               | passwords. What makes you think they'll be willing to put
               | up with more inconvenience?
               | 
               | Again, the problem is the unsophisticated user who only
               | has so much brain space for this shit.
        
         | _Algernon_ wrote:
         | This contributes nothing to the discussion, except giving you a
         | reason to feel better than others for arbitrary reasons.
        
           | InCityDreams wrote:
           | The gpost contributed to the discussion i am having with my
           | kids, namely: avoid cloud-based pw storage. They're beginning
           | to understand why, finally. We also discussed 'feeling better
           | than others for arbitrary reasons '.
        
       | prettyStandard wrote:
       | I wasn't quite ready to self promote this but I will go ahead
       | anyway, since people are probably researching alternatives now.
       | I'm working on a comparison of different password managers.
       | 
       | https://password-manager.soft-wa.re/
       | 
       | At this point it's mainly a fork&merge of some previous work.
       | 
       | If you find any issues with the data please submit a PR.
       | 
       | Edit: I am standing on the shoulders of giants. Take a look at
       | the contributors page. I am taking what was previously a blog
       | post, and giving it some extra attention with the current going-
       | ons. https://blog.kamens.us/head-to-head-comparison-of-
       | password-m...
       | 
       | Some of y'all have already found a few issues, I will work
       | through them, and submit a "Show HN" once I get it to that point.
       | So take everything here with a grain of salt. And if you do know
       | better, please submit a PR here:
       | 
       | https://github.com/Soft-wa-re/password-manager-comparer
        
         | burkaman wrote:
         | Bitwarden has a useful status page that you can subscribe to
         | with RSS: https://status.bitwarden.com/
         | 
         | Would be happy to submit a PR, but I couldn't find a link to a
         | repo and couldn't find the code on GitHub.
        
           | prettyStandard wrote:
           | https://github.com/Soft-wa-re/password-manager-comparer
        
         | RubberSoul wrote:
         | Great overview! I think 1Password's Linux support has been
         | improving [0]. I use 1Password with an Ubuntu desktop and have
         | been happy with it.
         | 
         | [0]: https://support.1password.com/explore/linux/
        
           | softskunk wrote:
           | agreed. linux desktop is absolutely fine for me.
        
           | m-p-3 wrote:
           | one thing I wish Bitwarden did is conditional username for
           | URI
           | 
           | I have some internal tools at work where you need to specify
           | the domain, and some where you don't. Having two separate
           | entries for these scenario is annoying, as I gotta update the
           | password on both when I change it.
        
           | prettyStandard wrote:
           | You can submit a PR here.
           | 
           | https://github.com/Soft-wa-re/password-manager-comparer
        
             | rdhyee wrote:
             | Thanks for providing the detailed comparison among the many
             | password managers. I think it's more accurate to describe
             | 1Password's CLI as "yes" rather than "yes?poor" and
             | submitted a PR for consideration: https://github.com/Soft-
             | wa-re/password-manager-comparer/pull...
        
           | Hackbraten wrote:
           | It's hardly working at all under Wayland. Copying to
           | clipboard has been broken for at least 18 months. AgileBits
           | doesn't seem to care. [0]
           | 
           | There are also sync issues (items created in the desktop app
           | won't appear in the browser extension unless I restart my
           | browser), which aren't occurring under Windows nor macOS.
           | 
           | ,,Poor" Linux support absolutely does the situation justice.
           | 
           | [0]: https://1password.community/discussion/comment/667970
        
         | gregmac wrote:
         | I see a few things that might be worth adding, as some were
         | explicitly why I switched from LastPass a few years ago:
         | 
         | * Security model. What is stored server-side unencrypted? In
         | what circumstances is the server-side encrypted data available
         | on the server in plaintext?
         | 
         | * Defaults: "parent-safe"? What trade-offs are made with the
         | defaults picked?
         | 
         | * Ability to edit (Android) app associations. Bitwarden has
         | this, and it solved a huge problem I had with duplicates on
         | LastPass. There's URI entries like androidapp://com.example.app
         | that are easy to manually merge and keep together with
         | corresponding web sites.
         | 
         | * Domain matching. Bitwarden can do: base, host, exact, starts
         | with, or regex. Lastpass had an "equivalent domains" managed
         | from obscure settings, which never really worked the way I
         | wanted. I used to have a billion entries for things in
         | _.mydomain.com, but bitwarden fixes this and by setting that
         | flag properly I get only relevant things for each internal app.
         | At the same time, for_.myapp.com and _.myapp.local I can get
         | the default dev login, so when I deploy a new instance /tenant
         | for dev, it "just works".
         | 
         | _ Username generation. Can it do plus-addresses? Catch-all
         | domains?
        
         | mrstone wrote:
         | Seems like a great product, but something about the URL is
         | reminiscent of those scammy websites that try to trick you into
         | downloading scamware.
        
           | DrewADesign wrote:
           | I'm admittedly a hammer seeing everything as a nail, but as a
           | designer, I see so many opportunities in FOSS lost to basic,
           | unnecessary branding and usability oversights. Developers
           | shouldn't expect themselves to be able to do good design work
           | any more than designers should expect themselves to be able
           | to make scalable, reliable, maintainable, production-ready
           | code. It's a specialty for a reason! Incorporating designers
           | into FOSS projects from the beginning seems like a no-
           | brainer, but design is nearly universally considered a
           | superficial matter to be considered once the _real work_ of
           | back-end development is done (which is generally never.) It
           | 's one of the reason that open source alternatives will
           | remain the alternatives rather than the standards. Good
           | design takes a lot of up-front work, and once you get ignored
           | or bikeshedded into oblivion with one design proposal, the
           | liklihood of doing it again is pretty much zero. Definitely
           | my white whale, but it kills me to see so many great projects
           | that could have so much more impact if they enfranchised
           | specialists to design the look and feel.
        
             | counttheforks wrote:
             | > Developers shouldn't expect themselves to be able to do
             | good design work
             | 
             | Rude. People can learn to do multiple things without being
             | pigeonholed, you know?
             | 
             | > I see so many opportunities in FOSS lost to basic,
             | unnecessary branding and usability oversights.
             | 
             | It's FOSS. Feel free to contribute.
        
               | codexon wrote:
               | Speaking as someone who was mainly a "developer" for a
               | while, one frequent problem I see from developers is that
               | they assume they can excel at everything because they are
               | good at coding. Since coding is a hard task that not
               | everyone can do well, they think this talent applies to
               | everything else.
               | 
               | Just a few weeks ago on here, there was a developer
               | complaining about not getting any attention through his
               | efforts on social media, and from what he said he did, it
               | was easy to tell he did not know what he was doing and
               | severely lacked the sophistication needed to succeed.
               | Instead of paying for marketing, he decided to do it
               | himself and was about to give up without even thinking
               | about paying someone else to do it.
               | 
               | This is hubris that is commonly seen in developers.
        
               | DrewADesign wrote:
               | Solid example, thanks. Worth specifically noting that we
               | shouldn't be quick to judge, though. Every one of us has
               | succumbed to novice cockiness at some point in our lives.
               | People who build things, like developers, gain novice-
               | level knowledge of everything from interface creation to
               | domain-specific knowledge to copy writing to photo
               | editing by osmosis. I'd be lying if I said I was any
               | different.
        
               | DrewADesign wrote:
               | > It's FOSS. Feel free to contribute.
               | 
               | My hours of dev contributions to FOSS projects over the
               | decades are somewhere in the low 5 figure range. Despite
               | having a formal art school design education, I never
               | contribute as a designer because FOSS projects are
               | usually openly hostile to design input, even by someone
               | like me who can implement it themselves.
               | 
               | > Rude. People can learn to do multiple things without
               | being pigeonholed, you know?
               | 
               | Pigeonholing by not expecting specialists to be competent
               | outside of their specialty? I have considerable
               | professional experience as both a designer and a
               | developer in the past decade-and-a-half, and a couple of
               | other completely unrelated careers in the decade before
               | prior. You're fishing for things to be offended by, and
               | probably misjudging the amount of design understanding
               | required for actual competence.
        
               | counttheforks wrote:
               | If you believe that developers can't do design, then why
               | do you think you can develop?
        
             | waboremo wrote:
             | One of the great difficulty of tackling that problem is
             | often FOSS projects are averse to design decisions like
             | that made by someone relatively fresh to the project - even
             | if the problem is incredibly obvious to the designers and
             | not the core development team. You would have to spend a
             | lot of time gaining trust to then be able to present an
             | idea like switching domains.
             | 
             | The duality of putting off design decisions until later,
             | and also feeling like your current design is extremely
             | personal (I've seen some projects where the maintainer
             | immediately disregards a lot of proposals design wise
             | because it's "good enough", as if that person just called
             | their baby ugly), can make trying to make any progress on
             | FOSS project feel horrible.
             | 
             | It's a very interesting problem space I feel. There's so
             | much room for improvement.
        
               | DrewADesign wrote:
               | As a professional designer who's spent more time in my
               | life developing FOSS than designing, I generally see FOSS
               | projects refusing to accept design input, period. I've
               | thought a lot about why and I see two broad problems:
               | 
               | First, developers have a different fundamental
               | perspective on interfaces than most people. They view
               | interfaces as a wrapper that you use to interact with the
               | important part: the application. To regular users, the
               | interface _is_ the application. I can 't tell you how
               | many times I've seen things like customizable color
               | themes or ill-conceived typeface changes be the primary
               | product of a developer-initiated "UX review," largely
               | because they didn't know how to identify actual usability
               | problems and wouldn't know how to craft solutions even if
               | they did. If it persists long enough, maintainers don't
               | just see their interfaces and user paths as flawed but
               | _good enough_ : they assume the mitigation techniques
               | they've developed to work around a bad interface are
               | _best practices._
               | 
               | Second, art school freshmen subconsciously trying to
               | prove their competence _to themselves_ give the harshest
               | and least useful critique and often take constructive
               | critique as a personal affront. That phenomenon seems
               | generalizable: critique about things we 're less
               | confident in makes us feel more insecure than critique of
               | things we're more confident in. If someone proposed
               | replacing a core piece of the architecture with something
               | different, they'd be confident enough to look at it and
               | rationally decide if it's beneficial. Conversely, when
               | developers see redesign proposals about interfaces they
               | were never confident in to begin with, they get
               | defensive, and design proposals get dismissed or
               | bikeshedded to complete buggery.
               | 
               | I think these two things imbue the FOSS development world
               | with indifference to, or even distrust of designers. You
               | only need to briefly look at threads on HN focused on
               | design or interface to see the open disdain many
               | developers have for designers. "Ruined by designers" is a
               | pretty common refrain. Despite our unicorn reputations, I
               | know lots of designers/developers, and every one that I
               | can recall at the moment contribute to FOSS... just
               | _never_ as designers because the process is so
               | irritating. Myself included. It 's just not worth the
               | amount of work that goes into a competent design
               | proposal, noting that I would implement it personally,
               | only to have it summarily dismissed by people with false
               | confidence in their analysis.
        
               | hyperman1 wrote:
               | Let me respond as a developer with admittedly no taste at
               | all, who both committed and fixed plenty of atrocities:
               | 
               | Just like security, design is one of these things where
               | snake oil salesmen are everywhere, to the point that
               | finding a good one without becoming a designer yourself
               | is hard. I also notice you identify as an artist, not a
               | psychologist, which seems the wrong approach to me.
               | 
               | So what will happen if I let designers loose on my
               | program? They might have real insight and improve things
               | a lot. Or maybe they'll go all artsy and put lipstick on
               | the pig, leaving me with an even worse program in lovely
               | pastels? Or maybe they'll dumb down an interface in an
               | attempt to create a granny-safe rocket launch pad,
               | leaving the actual rocket engineers frustrated? Or
               | they'll just move stuff around for the sake of moving
               | stuff around, creating a lot of busywork and forcing user
               | retraining without any upside. I've seen all these things
               | happen.
               | 
               | So what is your advise to this dev? How do I get
               | designers that actually improve the design?
        
         | FatActor wrote:
         | Sweet. I've been looking for this. I decided to ditch my home-
         | grown solution and switch to a real manager this week.
         | 
         | One note:
         | 
         | 1Password uses WebAuth for Yubikey and LastPass uses text
         | input. This makes LastPass work across *remote terminals* where
         | you don't have access to the physical machine. Now, there might
         | be a vulnerability lurking in there, but I often find myself
         | working on a remote windows machine and need to log into
         | something.
         | 
         | Maybe this should be a footnote in your Yubikey row? Or its own
         | row, if it isn't already in there and I missed.
        
         | neontomo wrote:
         | High value comment. Thanks, this is awesome.
        
         | grahamplace wrote:
         | I'd be curious to know which one you personally use given all
         | the research into the topic?
        
         | KomoD wrote:
         | Broken as hell for me. "no?yes" "unknown?yes"
         | 
         | "1 undefined" "2 undefined" "3 undefined"
        
         | rkagerer wrote:
         | This is helpful. Would love to see KeePass and its variants on
         | here.
        
         | dariusm5 wrote:
         | I don't see any mention of local vaults on the page.
         | 
         | Is there any password manager out there besides keepass that
         | isn't cloud based?
        
           | hjuutilainen wrote:
           | There's also Enpass (https://www.enpass.io/) which markets
           | itself as an offline password manager.
        
             | eric-burel wrote:
             | I use and like it
        
               | rkagerer wrote:
               | Two questions:
               | 
               | 1) How's it do at syncing / conflicts?
               | 
               | 2) In the Android app, do you know if there's a way to
               | use the fingerprint feature without storing your master
               | password or an encrypted derivative of it to non-volatile
               | memory?
               | 
               | For those scratching their heads at #2, it's motivated by
               | my lukewarm trust of vendor-implemented components of
               | Android Keystore. Some competing apps address it by
               | making you authenticate with the full password the first
               | time after boot (or after the app is closed by the user /
               | memory management system / configurable timeout) and just
               | tie your fingerprint to an "unlock" pin of sorts that
               | only works when the database is "hot".
        
               | neodymiumphish wrote:
               | Which apps handle this better? I'm not supremely
               | concerned about my password being pulled from memory,
               | from an attack surface perspective, but I am curious
               | which apps address this best and how.
        
               | rkagerer wrote:
               | Not saying it's the best out there (and the UI is a
               | little clunky as it often flashes a pin input screen that
               | gets skipped over when using your fingerprint), but I
               | like how Keypass2Android can be configured to do it. When
               | you select "Enable Biometric Unlock for Quick Unlock"
               | (and don't disable the PIN feature) you can use your
               | fingerprint as long as the app is still in memory,
               | without it storing your master password.
               | 
               | I know the Android Lastpass client would often prompt for
               | a Master Password if it hadn't been used in a while, then
               | let Fingerprints unlock it. I assumed it did something
               | similar but haven't deep-dived the implementation.
        
             | dariusm5 wrote:
             | I just installed Enpass and it's exactly what I was looking
             | for, thanks!
        
           | tex0 wrote:
           | KeePass(X), Password Store/Gopass, pwSafe, ...
           | 
           | Plenty of good choices.
        
         | paranoidxprod wrote:
         | Thanks for posting this. I was about to post an "Ask HN" to see
         | what password managers people here are using, but this seems
         | very helpful to compare the various services.
        
           | flipbrad wrote:
           | Keepass and syncthing.
        
             | paranoidxprod wrote:
             | After doing some more research, I've pretty much come to
             | the conclusion I should be using KeePass (or KeePassXC) but
             | I wasn't really sure how I should go about syncing. I will
             | definitely look into Syncthing, thanks!
        
         | password1 wrote:
         | Please change your domain, looks like a phishing website. I
         | would never clic on that anywhere else on the internet.
        
           | HollywoodZero wrote:
           | +1. The URL is a huge red flag since it's exactly how
           | scammers create fake links online.
        
           | Sephr wrote:
           | Clicking on a 'phishing' link can't hurt, and it's not like
           | this person's website is ever going to be presented to you in
           | a sensitive context (e.g. "download/install software from
           | this site"). You should trust that your browser is secure
           | enough to render random webpages.
           | 
           | Excuse the self-promotion, but I take it that you're also too
           | wary to click on this link to read my blog:
           | https://dangerous.link/virus.exe
        
             | waboremo wrote:
             | Your link is actually a great example. It's readable, you
             | know what each part of the link is for (unless you're tech
             | illiterate in which case just the readable quality is
             | enough). And so by clicking it, I know I'll probably head
             | to some page called Dangerous to see virus.exe.
             | 
             | Contrast that to a link like "password-man-comp.tool.win".
             | Which at first glance can be confusing to most where the
             | TLD is and where the subdomain is. Or like the above
             | person's tool. Either go with something readable, even if
             | long, or go with something short and clever. Combining both
             | winds up looking suspicious to most people.
             | 
             | Which I guess is the funny part, the ones most harmed by a
             | badly named website/link are genuine people wanting to
             | provide a service to others, whereas malicious actors will
             | likely use more effective (and less easily blocked) means
             | of phishing.
        
             | nkrisc wrote:
             | Any URL on the web could host a browser exploit that
             | requires no interaction beyond visiting, but if I had to
             | guess which one were most likely to, I'd put phishing links
             | up there.
             | 
             | > You should trust that your browser is secure enough to
             | render random webpages.
             | 
             | I honestly don't. Is dangerous.link/virus.exe any more
             | dangerous than nytimes.com? Probably not. However if some
             | 0-day, no interaction browser exploit does exist, it's
             | easier to put the exploit on the some lookalike phishing
             | domain rather than additionally exploit some mainstream
             | site.
             | 
             | Of course I can't possibly know what URLs are "safe" to
             | click on and which ones aren't, but I'm going to guess that
             | URLs that look like they're intended for a phishing
             | campaign are less likely to be safe than any other.
             | 
             | If your blog is go0gle-com.net, and someone emails or
             | messages it to me, I'm not clicking on it and deleting the
             | message.
             | 
             | Most often what happens is I click some sketchy looking
             | link on my phone and it attempts to hijack the browser with
             | popups and history modifications and whatever other shit
             | they do to let me know my Android iPhone is infected and
             | must be cleaned immediately.
        
               | hejaodbsidndbd wrote:
               | [dead]
        
         | notlukesky wrote:
         | I would second the change in the url. Good job though.
        
         | jxm262 wrote:
         | This is absolutely great. Thanks for sharing!
        
         | swyx wrote:
         | maybe one thing to add is "number of HN results above 50 points
         | in the past 3 years" as a proxy for potential security issues
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | gleenn wrote:
         | I don't think 1Password has any free tier, at least pretty sure
         | it doesn't have free syncing across devices anymore or even
         | ever.
        
           | mdaniel wrote:
           | It depends on how one views "free tier," since if one doesn't
           | pay when requested (whether from the end of a trial, just
           | normal expiry, or if there's a separation event from the
           | "free family for business") the vault remains yours and
           | active, but goes read only.
           | 
           | I don't know what would lead you to believe there's _any_
           | syncing restriction from 1Password, but if that is your
           | experience it 's almost certainly a bug, since to the very
           | best of my knowledge 1Password doesn't engage in hostage-
           | taking like that
        
         | dgrin91 wrote:
         | This is a cool page. One thing that is important for me that is
         | lacking here is emergency access (e.g.
         | https://www.lastpass.com/features/emergency-access). It would
         | be great to see side-by-side comparisons of that.
        
         | traceroute66 wrote:
         | What's with "MacOS" vs "macOS" in the toggle features ?!?
        
         | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
         | Cool stupfh.
         | 
         | Minor bug: I unchecked "CLI," and still got this row:
         | 
         |  _> CLI export includes attachments_
        
         | cshokie wrote:
         | I don't see an issues tab so I can't open a bug report. There
         | are two redundant checkboxes for MacOS (differing by
         | capitalization).
        
         | linuxlizard wrote:
         | Thank you for this work! Could you add Bruce Schneier's PWSafe?
         | https://pwsafe.org/
        
           | prettyStandard wrote:
           | You can submit a PR here: https://github.com/Soft-wa-
           | re/password-manager-comparer
        
             | linuxlizard wrote:
             | Sorry. You did say that already. I will. Thank you!
        
           | A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
           | Simple. Portable. Works across platforms. Local. If that is a
           | selling point for you, password safe just works. I apologize
           | if it sounds like an ad, but I am a very happy user.
        
             | linuxlizard wrote:
             | Those are all good selling points for me. Thank you! I'm
             | building the Linux version now.
        
         | wlll wrote:
         | For some reason "MacOS" appears twice for me in the "options"
         | section. I'd love for some more options.
         | 
         | - Doesn't require a subscription
         | 
         | - Doesn't require a web login
         | 
         | - Allows local vaults
        
           | dijit wrote:
           | gnu-pass and bitwarden tick those boxes at least-
           | 
           | any other requirements that maybe you simply assume should be
           | available (like browser extensions)
        
             | wlll wrote:
             | Thanks, I'll remember those when my current 1Password 7
             | setup becomes unviable.
        
         | notlukesky wrote:
         | Never seen a url like that for such a project. FYI
        
         | fluidcruft wrote:
         | One of the major features I'm looking for is the ability to
         | easily list passwords by age.
         | 
         | The use case is "I want an easy access "todo list" of all
         | passwords to update that are older than (x months|specific
         | date)"
         | 
         | I would use this after notification of a breach or on my own
         | schedule. Having to manually inspect each item is not
         | acceptable.
         | 
         | Bonus points if I can specify a "policy" for items (using tags
         | and groups is acceptable if they can be incorporated into the
         | search without too much effort). Super bonus points if the tool
         | generates notifications and todo list automatically.
         | 
         | Why these features are not standard boggles the mind. LastPass
         | used to have this feature but removed it for who-know-why
         | reasons.
        
         | poopypoopington wrote:
         | you should add apple keychain
        
       | revskill wrote:
       | I'm not sure about the insight. But i hate the UI, UX of
       | Lastpass. Why it's so hard to change for simplicty and ease of
       | use ? Is it dark pattern, is it technically impossible due to
       | technical architectural complexity, or tech debt,.. ?
       | 
       | At least the UI tells me something about the internal.
        
         | alar44 wrote:
         | No idea what you're talking about. I manage LastPass for 200
         | not very tech savvy users and no one has any problems using it.
        
           | user3939382 wrote:
           | The login text input button overlay is often obscured by
           | other elements with click triggers, in some cases making it
           | unusable. Many sites don't populate with the input button so
           | you have to get the password using context menus.
           | 
           | I've trained 3-4 non-technical users on LastPass and none of
           | them found it intuitive or easy.
           | 
           | I've managed it in a corporate environment for dozens of
           | users who were younger and more tech savvy, for them it was
           | mostly okay.
        
       | firstSpeaker wrote:
       | "We learn here that LastPass was storing your IP addresses. And
       | since they don't state how many they were storing, we have to
       | assume: all of them. And if you are an active LastPass user, that
       | data should be good enough to create a complete movement profile.
       | Which is now in the hands of an unknown threat actor."
       | 
       | Scary for activists anywhere.
        
       | galoisscobi wrote:
       | As an aside, I'm curious if Bitwarden is considered a relatively
       | safe password manager?
        
         | mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
         | It's considered the best cloud based one. Allows self hosting,
         | is open source and audited, and is end-to-end encrypted.
        
           | tryfinally wrote:
           | I had a little trouble using Bitwarden a while ago (user
           | error) and the (free tier) customer support was very
           | responsive and helpful as well.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2022-12-27 23:02 UTC)