It is truly upsetting to see how few people use password managers. I have witnessed people who always use the same password (and even tell me what it is), people who try to login to accounts but constantly can’t remember which credentials they used, people who store all of their passwords on a text file on their desktop, people who use a password manager but store the master password on Discord, entire tech sectors in companies locked to LastPass, and so much more. One person even told me they were upset that websites wouldn’t tell you password requirements after you create your account, and so they screenshot the requirements every time so they could remember which characters to add to their reused password.
Use a password manager. Whatever solution you think you can come up with is most likely not secure. Computers store a lot of temporary files in places you might not even know how to check, so don’t just stick it in a text file. Use a properly made password manager, such as Bitwarden or KeePassXC. They’re not going to steal your passwords. Store your master password in a safe place or use a passphrase that you can remember. Even using your browser’s password storage is better than nothing. Don’t reuse passwords, use long randomly generated ones.
It’s free, it’s convenient, it takes a few minutes to set up, and its a massive boost in security. No needing to remember passwords. No needing to come up with new passwords. No manually typing passwords. I know I’m preaching to the choir, but if even one of you decides to use a password manager after this then it’s an easy win.
Please, don’t wait. If you aren’t using a password manager right now, take a few minutes. You’ll thank yourself later.
So many folks talking about which software they use, and how they sync it between devices etc.
You all know there are hardware password keepers right? They present to your devices as a usb and/or bluetooth keyboard and just type out the user/password that you select. They have browser plugins to ease the experience. Now your password is not even stored on the device you’re using to perform your login and it will work on any modern device even without internet access.
Oh and no subscription fee to cover the costs of cloud infrastructure.
What happens if it gets lost stolen or broken?
That will vary from vendor to vendor. In the case of the one I like there are a few relevant things.
The password db is stored encrypted on the device. Accessing the passwords requires all of:
- the device
- a smartcard with a particular secret on it
- the 4 digit hex pin to unlock the secret on said smartcard, which is what is used to decrypt the db
Three PIN failures and the smart card is invalidated.
That sort of covers “stolen” and “lost + recovered by a baddie”. Your bad actor would need to have their hands on both physical pieces and guessed the 4 digit hex code in 3 tries.
As far as a user recovering from a lost or failed device or smart card goes, you can export the encrypted version of the db for backups, which I do to a thumb drive I keep in my document safe. I do the same with a backup smart card. So that and a backup device or purchasing a new one if yours fails or is lost/stolen.
In the super “just in case” move, I also keep a keepassdb on said thumb drive. In case my device fails and it’s just not possible to get a new one. Kind of like keeping two cloud providers in case LastPass goes bankrupt or something.
Hyptothetically, couldnt an attacker clone the smart card and retry on the copies?
I would believe a salted and hashed 0-knowledge password vault is more secure than a US-company which could be forced to surrender private keys used for the encryptionHow would any company, regardless of geography have the secret I generated? This is a stand alone hardware device. They seller is not involved at all once I’ve received my package.
Could a sophisticated/well resourced actor clone the smart card they stole or you lost? Sure, brute force attacks are brute force attacks. At least you’d know your device and card are stolen. Now you’re in a race to reset your passwords before they finish making 500 clones of the smart card they stole.
Hypothetically I could blackmail someone at LastPass and have a backdoor is installed for me.
Someone could bust down my door while I have it connected and unlocked and just login to all my things. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
You lost an arm. Remember to use the
\to escape the markdown ;)I don’t know much of smart cards and the whole hardware based authentication beyond knowing they exist at all so please take my questions for what they are.
I was thinking the encryption on those cards are done with a private key and a writer/reader by the manufacturer (like HID). So if the NSA busts down the door and demands the key you could technically decrypt it.
So if you generate your own private key that vector is obviously mitigated, assuming they are providing the tool with a non-reversible hashing process or a guide on how to generate the key so it wouldn’t aid in the brure forces decryption.Thank you for the info :)
I saw the lack of arm and facepalmed but I was half asleep poo posting so got over it :p (fixed now!)
I’ve been using this device for ~5 years now, so my memory is a little hazy on it, but I’m pretty sure for the particular device I prefer (which is to say, I have nfc what the setup is for other vendors, which could be greatly superior) the AES-256 key used for encryption isn’t generated until you setup your first card.
I save copies of the password database in several locations. I have to keep them synchronized manually but that’s preferable to using commercial ones that take turns in getting their data breached.
Curiously enough, I never heard of those. Do you happen to know good ones so I can further check?
I’m a pretty big fan of the mooltipass. They’re sold out and between iterations right now, but a new one is expected soon. One of my coworkers is pretty into their OnlyKey.
Mooltipass looks sick actually. I have my reservations regarding the ble part, but I would have to look into it more to understand it. Might get one to check around how well it works (once availability is there)
Been using Bitwarden for a couple years now…
No regrets
Personally, I use PassWord123! for everything. It says its a strong and secure password so why wouldn’t I use it for everything?
Its the best one to use, all password hacking tools avoid this one when they’re attacking.
Whatever solution you think you can come up with is most likely not secure.
Having my passwords written down on a piece of paper is not safe ?
Maybe it’s secure but not safe. You won’t know if you have mistaken a character until it’s too late, or when you have written it ambiguously but you still remember it and don’t notice.
Sorry for the bother, but I get a little annoyed when people try to argue semantic difference in synonyms. What do you think is the difference between secure and safe?
Security and safety are not synonymous, they have a different meaning.
Security is that your password is stored in a way that it cannot be accessed by those you don’t want. Safety means that you won’t lose access to it and that it remains usable.
The distimction may be clearer with an other example.
A factory is secure if only the employees can enter, and it is safe if it does not want to fall apart and the machines in it don’t kill the employees.
Maybe it can be generalized so that security is for the access, safety is for the mistakes and the disasters.
No. Anyone near you or with access to your place can see it. And most people know of the tricks.
Also you can’t encrypt it and most of all you can’t really generate as strong passwords as those generated by password managers, meaning I don’t even need the paper to try and crack your password
you can’t encrypt it
My friend, you will be surprised that encryption is something that not only the magical internet machine can do.
@Charger8232 I have been using Vaultwarden (Unofficial Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust) selfhosted for a few years now, and I have to say I’m very happy with it. I also use the backup strategy, on some media (USB stick and SSD) encrypted with Veracrypt.
In my experience preaching this same thing to many users at work and just personal friends, they won’t change their ways. Because “omg not another password to remember” and “that’s too much work to login just to get a password”.
I’ve just stopped trying to educate people at this point. That’s on them when their info gets leaked or accounts drained.
I am fighting this with people at work.
No, it is not “one more password to remember”
You have 2 passwords: your laptop and your Bitwarden. Forget everything else. Don’t care. Use a passphrase if you have troubles with passwords.
I even generated a sample password from bitwarden and drew them a picture of how to remember it lol
Still about 10% of people forgot their password in the first 2 months.
People are already annoyed at base that they need any 2FA at all and don’t want to deal with more info. They just tune out.
Yup, they couldnt care less about any 2FA. But then they get the surprised Pikachu face when they get breached after being phished lol.
Tell them some password managers have TOTP support. I think I paid Bitwarden $10 for life or per year for TOTP so I don’t need to use my phone.
whats that and how can i use it to get rid of 2fa?
Instead of opening Google authenticator or Authy or whatever your preferred 2FA is, you can take photos of the QR codes in Bitwarden mobile to store the TOTP codes in it, and then Bitwarden puts them on your clipboard to paste into websites
you might have just inadvertedly sold me on bitwarden.
does it work with 3rd party sort of authentication apps? like when 2fa is inside the manufacturer app?
It works as long as you can get at the authentication key that generates the one time codes. Usually you scan a QR code, but sometimes you have to paste it in as a string.
How you get that private authentication key can vary by service. For example, you can install steam mobile on an android emulator and use an open source program to extract the private authentication key.
That kinda defeats the purpose of 2fa though, if you use bitwarden for both
One person even told me they were upset that websites wouldn’t tell you password requirements after you create your account,
To be fair, that is super fucking annoying. I hate when I tell bitwarden to save my password only to have the site come back with it being too long and only some special characters are allowed.
My favorite is the sites that silently truncate your password to a maximum length only they know, before storing it. Then when you come back you have to guess which substring of your password they actually used before you can log in. Resetting doesn’t help unless you realize they’re doing this and use a short one.
I like the password in my thinkpad’s bios that’s case sensitive when entering it to log in, but setting the password it’s not. That took me a while to figure out.
Similarly, sites that don’t handle backslashes properly. I’ve had a few where I had to use my password sans all the backslashes because it interpreted them as an escape character.
Omfg, one of my banks did this to me and was infuriating. I was able to call in to fix it and made a bug report, but goddamn, what idiot silently truncates the sign up password but not also the login form?!?
My favorite was the password set screen allowing up to 64 characters, but login fails if the password is over 32 chars.
My webhost allows passwords of all length and complexities in the password set field, but will strip $ and & on the login mask on their main website, like in the top right corner.
A failed login will automatically bring you to a dedicated login.xxx.yyy subdomain and prompt a password reset, but if you use the login mask there instead, the exact same password works.
Login and password set/reset forms being out of sync is a classic. 😆
I haven’t seen that one in a while luckily.
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Reddit used to silently truncate passwords. I can’t log in to my original account because they “fixed” the issue at some point
Clarification: They reuse the same password (such as “Password”) and whenever they create an account they have to add special characters (like “Password1&” if numbers and #@&%$ were required) and when they login they forget which special characters were required by that service, meaning they don’t know which special characters to append to their generic password to successfully login. The solution was to screenshot every password requirement for every service and still try to remember which characters were used.
But yes, there is an unrelated frustration where password requirements aren’t presented upfront.
But yes, there is an unrelated frustration where password requirements aren’t presented upfront.
And pinnacle of this frustration is “password too long”… Talk about security
which doesn’t make sense as a requirement, as the passwords themselves are not even (supposed to be) stored
limits of 128+ characters? Sure.
Limits of 30, 20, 18, or 16 as I’ve seen in many places? I suddenly don’t trust your website.
Steam and Spotify are notorious for this.
Do you want to know the kicker? There are banks (yes, you heard me right) that straight up don’t allow more than 20 chars. 20!!! And they say you got to use the app for X things because it’s secure and shit (e.g.: use the app to 2FA credit card transactions). Meanwhile, does not allow you to add a yubikey for Fido authentication
Been using 1Password for 6+ years and I probably won’t use anything else ever. My wife and I both use it and have a shared family vault for things we both use. I couldn’t live without a password manager.
Absolutely this. Been using KeePassDX for years and its made my life so much easier. I am waiting for it to support passkeys so i can start using them where possible.
I’ve been using Firefox’s built in password store, plus 2fa for sensitive accounts when possible. Are there any known issues? Uploading all my passwords to someone else’s server sounds silly.
Uploading all my passwords to someone else’s server sounds silly.
KeePassXC is entirely local.
Are there any known issues?
LastPass (ironically) explains this best: https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/2022/06/why-you-shouldnt-store-passwords-in-a-browser
Thanks but the LastPass article is partly inapplicable and partly marketing. The one good point it makes for non-corporate users is about leaving your browser open where attackers can access it, say at the office. For a while I tried using a FIDO2 token but they weren’t well enough supported at the time. Maybe that is easier now.
I guess the reasons I would make would be not all accounts are web-based, and using a browser for anything other than browsing is a bad idea. Browsers aren’t exactly focused on keeping passwords safe, so why not use a tool designed for it? Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket
P.S. Yes, FIDO2 is much more supported
I guess I use a few APIs with auth tokens that are like passwords but I don’t see how a password manager would help. Yeah the tech for this stuff could be better, but vendors keep messing it up.
What about your Lemmy account?
On my laptop I use the Firefox password store. On my phone I mostly use Voyager which presumably stores the password in a protected app file. It could probably be extracted by rooting the phone but that has gotten harder to do, and anyway it’s also in Firefox on the same phone. Voyager is basically an API client. I can see some interesting ways to improve this but haven’t cared enough.
Theoretically, it’s possible to store a encrypted database on someone else’s system in a way where they never have the ability to see its contents, as you encryption and decryption only ever happens in the client on your devices.
Whether this is actually done in a way that enforces that on various password managers is unknowable with proprietary code.
Personally I self-host vaultwarden. All the benefits of syncing my passwords across devices, but the server enabling that, runs on my hardware.
To use that remote encrypted db, you need a stored client side secret, and a customer service department that deals with users who have lost that. See also “mud puddle test”.
and a customer service department that deals with users who have lost that
I’d not heard of the “mud puddle test” but I immediately thought that any provider that does that, is doing it wrong.
Unless there’s an exploit of which I’m unaware, my self-hosted solutions pass the mud puddle test.
Companies have to know about the mud puddle test, but then they have to make an informed decision about whether they want to pass it. Hard disk and data recovery companies have been known to employ grief counsellors to assist their customers in coping with finding out that their disk drive is too trashed for the data to be restored. Choosing to fail the mud puddle test puts the password manager company in the same position. Some customers may, in fact, expect that recovering from the mud puddle is one of the services they are paying the company for. It’s the same reason hosted databases like RDS are a thing. Either way though, the company should be transparent about how they handle this question.
I agree with all of that, I was just pointing out that “uploading all your passwords to someone else’s server” can be done in a way that isn’t silly. You’re preaching to the choir.
Though even then, the best way is for that server to be yours, not someone else’s. And it does come with advantages in terms of convenience.
The benefits of having my passwords on a server (even my own server) seem tiny compared to just occasionally having to type one into a second computer after generating it on the first. If I had used a dozen computers instead of two, maybe it would be something to think about.
I don’t understand.
You only use each passwords once? You never log in to things on a new device without the one on which you created the account on hand? You only ever need authentication on two devices?
I own half a dozen devices on which I might want to log into places, and on several occasions it has been extremely useful to be able to access my password database from a completely new device from anywhere in the world, with nothing but the memorized master credentials.
I don’t think you can argue that the advantages don’t exist, even if they aren’t useful to you personally.
Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted. So Firefox’s password manager with syncing does this.
KeepassXC ++ Yubikey ++ STRONG password changed every 7 days.
Tap for spoiler
This solution is compatible with virtually all platforms & browsers
Changing passwords is almost always completely useless, and requiring it dramatically weakens security.
What’s the logic behind this statement? I would’ve thought that if a website’s logins and passwords were somehow leaked, the more often I change my password, the less likely it is for the leaked password to still be usable by bad guys based on the shorter time horizon.
Leaked how? No good practice allows any way for a password to “leak”.
What rotating passwords does is ensure people who don’t use a password manager either write their password down more and more frequently, or use a weaker password with some simple changing pattern that doesn’t add anything.
I’m not in IT but I followed the Michael Bazzell podcast until he disappeared. Guy was a bit paranoid but there was great info there. My understanding was browser saving passwords isn’t secure, that those passwords are open to scraping from bad players. Ofc I can’t reference this because the entire body of over 300 podcasts disappeared with him.
Agree on Bitwarden and such.
You are right. However most of the mainstream YouTubers promote rubbish password managers, which is why most people I know don’t know about bitwarden. I usually recommend bitwarden or proton pass. (I’m self-hosting vaultwarden). More privacy focus YouTubers need to promote bitwarden, keepassxc etc. (I’m waiting for proton pass self-hosting option).
but bitwarden, keepassxc don’t pay them… RHEEEE
whats missing, since the proton pass source code is available?
I have only found the source code for the Android and iOS application, but not for the server.
Using Proton Pass was a game changer to me , I don’t have to ignore the necessity to put a strong and complicated password for security reasons anymore, Proton generate it to me and stores everything ( so I don’t need to remember which password I set for which account ) But the bad aspects of cloud services worry me a little about this: the possibility of a security breach of the service, or the possibility of not being able to access it for any reason is a real disaster if it happens… so I’m thinking of exporting my passwords to another safe place for such cases.
so I’m thinking of exporting my passwords to another safe place for such cases.
I’m also using ProtonPass, and I agree it’s a game changer. I love the interface, the Android app is amazing and well integrated.
To not be locked in into ProtonPass in case of real disaster, once a month I export the ProtonPass data and import to KeepassXC in my local machine. It’s pretty easy, you just have to export to CSV, and import into KeepassXC, the interface will help you to map the CSV fields accordingly, and you will have a local accessible backup in case of disaster. Don’t forget to remove the CSV from your computer after importing to KeepassXC.
You can export all your passwords to an encrypted and password protected file. I ocasionally back it up to a USB device so that I always have an offline copy available.
Still, one of these days I was logged out of my proton pass on Android and couldn’t connect to the internet. I was locked down.
But the bad aspects of cloud services worry me a little about this
KeePassXC is entirely local.
I know , but won’t that affect my storage if I added +1000 password ?
unless your storage is a floppy disk, won’t be a problem
I actually considered sticking it on a floppy disk I have. It really is a wonder how Linux is able to recognize floppy disks immediately…
Passwords don’t take up much space.
It shouldn’t take up too much space. My personal password file is under 2 KB, so for you it may be 1 MB at most.
Which creates issue with having to synchronize it between devices. There is always something to worry about :)
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
that’s nice soundbite, i am just saying you have to be realistic. if you are aiming at people who up until now had their passwords on post-it on the monitor, switching to tool where you need to come up with some synchronization system on your own might not be what convinces them.
Exactly, so use Proton :P
even if their servers were compromised it’s all encrypted. it only decrypts on your end
I store my master password on a sticky note attached to the bottom of my desktop’s power supply. Easily accessible if I were to die, but sufficiently secure that if it were physically compromised I would have significantly worse problems on my hands.
