For anybody else left wondering, Bitwarden does encrypt (nearly) everything in your vault:
> At Bitwarden we take this trusted relationship with our users seriously. We also built our solution to be safe and secure with end-to-end encryption for all Vault data, including website URLs, so that your sensitive data is “zero trust” secure [1]
I haven't used LastPass in years, but the recent news made me wonder how Bitwarden was handling URLs.
I feel like there should be a law of the internet for this. The more a company asserts that their data is secure and encrypted and you should trust them, the more likely it is to leak and be proven to be massively vulnerable.
It’s fine to store your passwords online for convenience, but as a user, it’s important to accept that it’s no longer your private password and will, at some point, leak.
I definitely feel the opposing law works. When I see a project with a massive disclaimer about "this crypto is not audited, I'm a noob never deploy this anywhere" I'm likely to see better crypto than most of the commercial products I work with, including ones with sales people that talk about unbreakable crypto.
>It’s fine to store your passwords online for convenience, but as a user, it’s important to accept that it’s no longer your private password and will, at some point, leak.
ehh. I store my passwords online but its on a file I encrypted offline with strong password (over 20+ characters) and key. I use keepass which is a locally encrypted and stored password manger, and I store the DB on Dropbox and download it to any of my computers/devices were it is decrypted locally when needed. I don't trust password wallet services ass they all seem to want to do the enryption server side with a reset-able password which really means they have the master password not you, but my set up seems secure enough to me.
How hard is it to store encrypted data that needs a locally held master key to decrypt? Pick any industry... You'd have to be willfully ignorant or outright corrupt to fail your core business promise, wouldn't you?
It all depends on how the data are encrypted. With a sensible design capturing the encrypted storage will only reveal the number of encrypted records, rough estimates on their size, and time stamps.
> The more a company asserts that their data is secure and encrypted and you should trust them, the more likely it is to leak and be proven to be massively vulnerable.
That's a consequence of the Murphy's law [1].
Very well written. You phrased it perfectly for it to have its place at [2] which is full of this kind of stuff. It's almost like this sentence claims itself the right to appear there. If you read French you might enjoy this website. If not, you might still enjoy the different phrasings of Murphy's law in different languages here [3].
Doesn't necessarily mean it's safe. Say there's passwords accidentally appearing in logs as part of a traceback - even if the passwords are kept encrypted, just having access to the logs is enough. Even if everything is encrypted client-side, it could appear as part of a client crash dump being sent by telemetry. Leaked plaintext databases aren't the only possibility.
Bitwarden caches Web urls as well on its browser extensions.
Sometimes it knows that you have saved login for the specific web page before you have logged in. Certainly LastPass had urls unencrypted for this specific reason - to show users that you have saved login for this page, would you like to login?
It is the endless usablity vs. security battle. Of course, there are better ways to implement this than LastPass has done.
Bitwarden, Keeper ($ but trusted at megacorps), and good ol' PasswordSafe are the safest solutions.
I run BW with Yubikey 2FA and a local hosted sync server.
KeePassX/C perhaps. Vault for secrets management.
Never touched LastPass, 1Password or any of these other mickey-mouse commercial apps that invariably claim "military-grade encryption" or "unhackable" when their fundamental constructions are crap.
I see a lot of people mentioning bitwarden around here; is their actually a technical reason to believe they are better than Lastpass or any of their competition (have they like open sourced all their stuff?).
There’s very little room for failure and learning in the online password safe field, so I generally assume these companies are in one of two states:
I would hope not... that term should be reserved to indicate that the data is encrypted on one of your devices and is merely passed encrypted through their servers to your other devices.
So is there any way to verify what this person is saying? I mean, from the way LastPass is evolving it doesn't seem unlikely to me -- but why is this tweet on HN? Is there any supporting evidence aside from an anecdote, does this Twitter account have a strong reputation of being credible, etc.?
Without context, I just don't understand why this anecdotal thread should be considered credible.
Disclaimer: I use FOSS password managers for everything possible but have to use LastPass for some non-personal stuff and I very much dislike it
It seems like a reasonably well written anecdote by someone who has some idea what they're talking about. It could obviously be false, but the consequences if he's right are potentially serious for a lot of HN users who might use LastPass. The consequences if he's wrong are a little extra reputational damage for LastPass, but that seems like a worthwhile tradeoff here.
Not everything posted on HN has to be verified true. The decision calculus here seems strongly in favor of signal boosting it, so that people who need to can take defensive action, even if it turns out to be wrong.
It's like a novice programmer blaming the compiler for a bug in their application. It's very unlikely to be true. What would you have the people who are using LastPass do, stop using it? Because some crypto dude stored their highly valuable keys in a system that literally copies their keys to any system they log into, to systems that are notorious for having very leaky abstractions and vast vulnerability surfaces?
That's subjective and has no value in determining whether the post is true.
"Not everything posted on HN has to be verified true. The decision calculus here seems strongly in favor of signal boosting it, so that people who need to can take defensive action, even if it turns out to be wrong."
What? Proven true, no, any sort of evidence, yes. As for taking actions, there's a cost.
This. Why would we be critical of LastPass being secretive and/or wrong and then take a tweet at face value?
From one of the tweets:
> I did not download anything. My machines are clean, and I have physical 2fa on everything. None of the links or contracts I interacted with were malicious. Nobody else had physical access to my PC.
Yeah sure. Sounds like my aunt when she messed up her PC and loudly claims "but I didn't do anything!" Surefire sign that she did. Turns out it's true, every time.
Quite obviously there isn't anything and the handle indicating a crypto hack it's as non-credible as anything can be but some folks on HN still fall for the crypto hype.
This is your regular reminder that all crypto is scam , this is a simple mathematical fact.
This is why Microsoft's requirement to drink a verification can was so genius. Imagine being a hacker and have to drink multiple verification cans to be able to proceed throughout multiple transactions. "Hacker dies from overdose due to ingestion of too much Doritos and Mountain Dew"
Wait, so you're telling me that Cloudflare interstitial is running some PoW check on my client? I always thought that was just a way to let the user know they're being rate limited on Cloudflare's end.
The inference that the LastPass leak is responsible is being made purely on the basis that this particular person can't identify any other way the security of their wallet was broken. That seems a very weak basis (essentially, absence of evidence equating to evidence of absence) to make what is really a very strong assertion.
I agree: LastPass has been hot garbage for many years but it still has a significant presence, some guy’s low-value crypto wallets would not be the first we hear about a compromise of LastPass vaults. There are entire companies using LastPass for critical systems.
I absolutely believe it’s possible that LastPass has been compromised more than they’ve let on and I won’t be surprised if we eventually find out vaults are vulnerable, but I don’t believe this is how it would play out.
Sunday the 18th is conveniently around the time of the latest announcement, but not the time of the actual hack. Feels like someone is over fitting.
But if you had a ton of credentials from people, scanning for crypto credentials and trying to use those may be easier/faster/safer to turn into money than system credentials to some random company network.
This attitude is why a poor person will effectively be put in debtors prison and no one bats an eye. It requires "someone important" before people think maybe it actually happens.
This is quite interesting. A couple of weeks ago, I received an extortion phishing email, but it was directed to a secondary email address that hasn’t been previously compromised. It made it past Gmail’s spam and phishing filters into my inbox.
Maybe a coincidence, but I guess every weird thing that happens is going to raise alarm bells.
I was suspicious of the LastPass concept (storing passwords in a cloud app) when a former employer introduced it some years ago, but they had a strong IT and security culture so I trusted them to make the right choices and adopted it for my personal use.
A few months ago I hsd an issue with my LastPass 2FA device and a policy set by my former employer blocked me from resetting it for my personal account. It was resolved by LastPass, but that was the first strike, and I had spent most of the night extracting my personal account passwords manually from the mobile app, which remained logged in. That was strike 1. This is strike 2.
I’d love to hear the story about bypassing/resetting that 2FA setting? Sounds suspiciously like something that could be social engineered around by a sufficiently skilled attacker?
I am very much of the opinion that if I fuck up my side of 2FA protection, the resources/accounts they’re protecting should be lost forever. (Or at the very least, a co-account holder might be able to reset some things, like my AWS IAM creds or GSuite admin account). If I can ring up and whine at enough support people to get them to hand over my account, so can a sufficiently persistent skilled social engineer…
Any two factor that doesn’t require your firstborn or travelling in person to some frightening building to remove is basically a form of security theater. Most can be removed by support pretty easily just by asking.
On a balance of risks, your your former employer may have made the right call. The issue is, do you use something that isn't perfect but everybody can use, or do have a substantial portion of tech illiterate people not use anything, which would be an even greater risk.
I think the policy is fine, but since I left my former employer more than a year ago, the policy should have been lifted on my personal account automatically (assuming that my former employer deactivated the work account, which I expect that they did).
Same thing for me with sudden spam emails. But the receive address did not have the customization for me to track it, instead my first name. Not sure if lastpass related but maybe.
BTW one client of mine runs a heavy security operation and they use KeePass.
This is ultimately a predictable outcome for any password manager that stores your credentials on someone else's server.
Just like they say in crypto "not your keys, not your crypto" - it applies here too. Not your storage, not your passwords.
KeePass on an airgapped box, or an encrypted hardware password manager with no network interfaces is best, though frankly, I'd even be more comfortable writing down passwords on paper (at home) than I would be storing them on someone else's server.
I say all this as a big tech red teamer, or, someone who breaches other people's servers for a living.
though frankly, I'd even be more comfortable writing down passwords on paper (at home) than I would be storing them on someone else's server.
100% agreed. Physical access is not something than an attacker, especially one likely to be in an entirely different country or even continent, can easily achieve.
A password manager is probably the worst possible candidate for being a cloud service. "Your entire list of passwords" is the one piece of data you absolutely, positively, do NOT want stored in the cloud. How these things gained such a following is mind-blowing.
Honestly, though, it's not that bad of an idea. Provides just enough convenience for people to use unique, randomly generated passwords for each login. Much worse for a website to leak the credentials you use for a bunch of other accounts. Using a pw manager and 2fa is imperfect but still the sweet spot in my opinion.
The idea of using crypto wallets as canaries is an interesting one, however. I bet you could set that up to only be tripped by a major compromise.
And yes - there is basically no way to actually prove that your passwords on a server aren’t accessible to someone - especially if they can update software.
Readit News
> At Bitwarden we take this trusted relationship with our users seriously. We also built our solution to be safe and secure with end-to-end encryption for all Vault data, including website URLs, so that your sensitive data is “zero trust” secure [1]
I haven't used LastPass in years, but the recent news made me wonder how Bitwarden was handling URLs.
[1] https://bitwarden.com/resources/zero-knowledge-encryption-wh...
It’s fine to store your passwords online for convenience, but as a user, it’s important to accept that it’s no longer your private password and will, at some point, leak.
ehh. I store my passwords online but its on a file I encrypted offline with strong password (over 20+ characters) and key. I use keepass which is a locally encrypted and stored password manger, and I store the DB on Dropbox and download it to any of my computers/devices were it is decrypted locally when needed. I don't trust password wallet services ass they all seem to want to do the enryption server side with a reset-able password which really means they have the master password not you, but my set up seems secure enough to me.
That's a consequence of the Murphy's law [1].
Very well written. You phrased it perfectly for it to have its place at [2] which is full of this kind of stuff. It's almost like this sentence claims itself the right to appear there. If you read French you might enjoy this website. If not, you might still enjoy the different phrasings of Murphy's law in different languages here [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy's_law
[2] https://courtois.cc/murphy/murphy.html
[3] https://courtois.cc/murphy/murphy_original.html
Security is the area where fast and fuzzy heuristics get you into problems.
Examine each option critically and reach independent conclusions.
Deleted Comment
I run BW with Yubikey 2FA and a local hosted sync server.
KeePassX/C perhaps. Vault for secrets management.
Never touched LastPass, 1Password or any of these other mickey-mouse commercial apps that invariably claim "military-grade encryption" or "unhackable" when their fundamental constructions are crap.
There’s very little room for failure and learning in the online password safe field, so I generally assume these companies are in one of two states:
* has unknown bugs waiting to be revealed
* out of business
https://www.lesspass.com/
https://1passwordstatic.com/files/security/1password-white-p...
It’s quite good.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
end-to-end encryption means something like https, it's a communication quality between trusted parties
https://www.ibm.com/topics/end-to-end-encryption
> Password managers [...] In this case, however, the user is on both endpoints and is the only person with a key.
Without context, I just don't understand why this anecdotal thread should be considered credible.
Disclaimer: I use FOSS password managers for everything possible but have to use LastPass for some non-personal stuff and I very much dislike it
Not everything posted on HN has to be verified true. The decision calculus here seems strongly in favor of signal boosting it, so that people who need to can take defensive action, even if it turns out to be wrong.
That's subjective and has no value in determining whether the post is true.
"Not everything posted on HN has to be verified true. The decision calculus here seems strongly in favor of signal boosting it, so that people who need to can take defensive action, even if it turns out to be wrong."
What? Proven true, no, any sort of evidence, yes. As for taking actions, there's a cost.
"I suspected someone used a 0day on me" is not exactly inspiring confidence
From one of the tweets:
> I did not download anything. My machines are clean, and I have physical 2fa on everything. None of the links or contracts I interacted with were malicious. Nobody else had physical access to my PC.
Yeah sure. Sounds like my aunt when she messed up her PC and loudly claims "but I didn't do anything!" Surefire sign that she did. Turns out it's true, every time.
One entity has something to lose, the other doesn't?
Deleted Comment
So feel free to go ahead and jump to conclusions :)
Is a meme
This is your regular reminder that all crypto is scam , this is a simple mathematical fact.
Dead Comment
See what is unencrypted in your LastPass vault - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105368 - Dec 2022 (9 comments)
LastPass breach is worse than you think because URLs were unencrypted - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34102982 - Dec 2022 (81 comments)
LastPass users: Your info and vault data is now in hackers’ hands - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34100087 - Dec 2022 (19 comments)
LastPass says hackers stole customers' password vaults - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34099647 - Dec 2022 (15 comments)
LastPass user vaults stolen in recent hack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34097142 - Dec 2022 (276 comments)
Lastpass Security Incident - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33806803 - Nov 2022 (560 comments)
LastPass confirms hackers had access to internal systems for several days - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32912350 - Sept 2022 (21 comments)
LastPass says hackers had internal access for four days - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32871051 - Sept 2022 (7 comments)
Last Pass Hacked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32612645 - Aug 2022 (35 comments)
LastPass: Notice of Security Incident - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32598587 - Aug 2022 (130 comments)
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https://imgur.com/dgGvgKF
I absolutely believe it’s possible that LastPass has been compromised more than they’ve let on and I won’t be surprised if we eventually find out vaults are vulnerable, but I don’t believe this is how it would play out.
Sunday the 18th is conveniently around the time of the latest announcement, but not the time of the actual hack. Feels like someone is over fitting.
Maybe a coincidence, but I guess every weird thing that happens is going to raise alarm bells.
I was suspicious of the LastPass concept (storing passwords in a cloud app) when a former employer introduced it some years ago, but they had a strong IT and security culture so I trusted them to make the right choices and adopted it for my personal use.
A few months ago I hsd an issue with my LastPass 2FA device and a policy set by my former employer blocked me from resetting it for my personal account. It was resolved by LastPass, but that was the first strike, and I had spent most of the night extracting my personal account passwords manually from the mobile app, which remained logged in. That was strike 1. This is strike 2.
I am very much of the opinion that if I fuck up my side of 2FA protection, the resources/accounts they’re protecting should be lost forever. (Or at the very least, a co-account holder might be able to reset some things, like my AWS IAM creds or GSuite admin account). If I can ring up and whine at enough support people to get them to hand over my account, so can a sufficiently persistent skilled social engineer…
It was a support request, and IIRC they disabled it remotely.
In my case I was off boarded by an employer, but retained access to it on my mobile device and could read all passwords.
Their initial response was that it was by design, then later tried to pay a bounty I never accepted.
BTW one client of mine runs a heavy security operation and they use KeePass.
Just like they say in crypto "not your keys, not your crypto" - it applies here too. Not your storage, not your passwords.
KeePass on an airgapped box, or an encrypted hardware password manager with no network interfaces is best, though frankly, I'd even be more comfortable writing down passwords on paper (at home) than I would be storing them on someone else's server.
I say all this as a big tech red teamer, or, someone who breaches other people's servers for a living.
100% agreed. Physical access is not something than an attacker, especially one likely to be in an entirely different country or even continent, can easily achieve.
And yes - there is basically no way to actually prove that your passwords on a server aren’t accessible to someone - especially if they can update software.
Sounds inconvenient for password retrieval when not home, how does this work in practice?
How about an airgapped phone with GrapheneOS and Keepass?