Password managers are less secure than promised

https://lemmus.org/post/20243586

Copy pasting a comment that I saw on Reddit

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Link to the original study (with a less sensationalized title):

https://zkae.io

A few important notes:

  • the study is about Bitwarden, LastPass, Dashlane and 1Password. Proton Pass isn’t mentioned.

  • the study presumes that they’re working with a malicious server (read this as compromised server, controlled by an attacker). The attacks they talk about in the article would not work on a normal server. Here’s their quote:

No need to panic: all of our attacks presume a malicious server. We have no reason to believe that the password manager vendors are currently malicious or compromised, and as long as things stay that way, your passwords are safe. That said, password managers are high-value targets, and breaches do happen.

  • Here’s another quote, about other password managers:

You can ask your provider the following questions:

  • ⁠Do you offer end-to-end encryption? What security do you provide in case your server infrastructure were to be compromised?
  • How do you check that public keys and public-key ciphertexts are authentic?
  • How do you authenticate security-critical settings, such as the KDF type and the iteration count?
  • Do you provide integrity guarantees for a user’s vault as a whole? Can a malicious server add items to your vault?
  • You can also ask your favourite password manager to commission an audit checking for our attacks in their products.

    • If you still feel unsure/unsafe, then adopt an offline password manager (I highly recommend keepassXC).
    Zero Knowledge (About) Encryption

    I too recommend KeepassXC, works even on android with KeepassDX. I use syncthing to sync between devices (work, personal and android)
    I also use KeepassXC, and it’s great. I’m interested in setting up Syncthing between my Android, Linux desktop, and NAS. Do you have any tips or articles/resources that you used to set it up?
    Although syncthing is awesome, i use rclone to fetch the latest version of the password database. With syncthing, i would worry about collisions. Maybe would be better to sync it between two devices, Android and Linux.