LastPass autofill exploit(labs.detectify.com) |
LastPass autofill exploit(labs.detectify.com) |
I'm not sure if it is, bugs like that are a serious threat. Personally I use the same (long) password for every website, except one of the characters which I replace by the website's first letter. One could think of similar, more sophisticated schemes of password reuse that yield a slightly different password for each website.
It would be even better if websites started using a public key authentication system, though.
https://twitter.com/taviso/status/758143119409885185
Tavis has made quite a name for himself lately by going after AV vendors with no mercy. So when he tweeted, the community sat up and took notice. (Our own Slack was busy with discussion about this today)
Mathias, author of this post replied to Tavis with this:
https://twitter.com/avlidienbrunn/status/758232557829914624
The fix for the detectify exploit has already been pushed to users, so I'm guessing they were holding onto this public disclosure but Tavis putting his sights on lastpass too caused them to move the schedule up a little.
And the exploit from Tavis from 4 hours ago:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=88...
It does erase the fields and promoted 2fa, but passwords are available briefly.
I Sent a ticket to their supportthey, they acknowledged the issue and just asked me to disable local cache... (Chrome extension)
You could even use replaceState to change it back immediately.
In fact, I'd go further and say that you can do this with your login name. So for example:
myemail+by@gmail.com for eBaY
This also helps mitigate those attacks where the attacker actually contacts support and socially engineers them into giving all your info and even stealing your account:
https://medium.com/@espringe/amazon-s-customer-service-backd...
If you are hosting with AWS you should really consider doing that
People who enable it might not understand the repercussions.
I use 1Password and always invoke a shortcut to fill in my credentials.
Try this: Cars are dangerous. Why do they even exist? People who drive might not understand the repercussions.
If 1password has the same functionality, it may contain a similar vulnerability, whether you're expected to use a keyboard shortcut or not.
First I decided 1Password to replace LastPass, but it puts a lot of weight on my pockets as it's very expensive. Then I encounter Enpass. It's a really good password manager. What I like about Enpass is that it saves database locally on my device not on their server and gives the desktop app for free.
It's worth to try and it hardly takes a few minutes to move all your LastPass database into into Enpass. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn69hHur3Jo
Thanks! :-)
Essentially, LastPass made the mistake of writing code which said "If you see `example.com` anywhere in the URL - assume that you're on the right site.
LastPass will allow you to automatically fill in the username and password as soon as you visit a site (I think this is an optional feature).
An attacker convinces you to visit "badsite.wtf/@example.com/". LastPass sees the "example.com" and autofills the password field. The site has some JavaScript to detect the filled in details - and steals them.
Also, what's the return value of the funcion?, and why are there 2 variable named URL?
[1]: https://blog.lastpass.com/2016/07/lastpass-security-updates....
[2]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=88...
It's easy to forget that sandboxed extensions don't exist yet in iOS (as of 9.3.3), and sometimes we still have to use bookmarklets.
As far as I know, bookmarklets aren't afforded any level of sandboxing type protection. I wonder if a malicious page could intervene like that.
No. People make mistakes. Honest, unintentional, well-meaning mistakes. Don't punish individuals for being human. Help them learn from them.
Don't make individuals afraid to do their job.
Should the _organization_ be punished? Should they pay more than $1000? That's well worth discussing.
Some people work in fields where there's an extremely high cost to making mistakes, and whose customers trust them to be careful and meticulous. Those people are paid to be more careful than your average code monkey who churns out regular expressions to save time instead of carefully researching the problem, performing code reviews, and using standard well tested libraries to parse complex but precisely documented standards like html and urls. Developing a browser plug-in to manage passwords is one of them.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems. -JWZ
How (and how often) are updates pushed to the client?
They're pushed via Chrome's extension store. Definitely at browser startup, but otherwise periodically every 5 hours (by default)
They have a good product, nice blog articles explaining various technical decisions they made, and a fast customer support in terms of listening feedback.
Beware though..their Android app does not support multiple vaults. And their Windows client is really ugly. Their iOS and Mac apps are very refined though..and I know the founder is trying to close this feature gap across platforms.
They seem to be moving towards subscription licenses with Teams and Family though...which do not require separate licenses for different platforms.
What's the difference with simply going to "http://twitter.com"?
This looks more like a bug than a vulnerability, what am I missing?
Remote JavaScript could trigger the export all passwords feature...
If they don't have those types of checks in place, that's the fault of the company.
If someone want's to sue over this, then sure, sue the individual (and the company). But as a manager in company, I would not not punish the individual. I would have them conduct a thorough post mortem and look for ways to avoid problems like this in the future. People do learn from their mistakes and that is valuable.
var parser = document.createElement('a');
parser.href = "http://example.com:3000/pathname/?search=test#hash";
parser.protocol; // => "http:"
parser.hostname; // => "example.com"
parser.port; // => "3000"
parser.pathname; // => "/pathname/"
parser.search; // => "?search=test"
parser.hash; // => "#hash"
parser.host; // => "example.com:3000"
For browser extensions, the URL constructor would be even easier: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/URL/URL (Yes, I know it says that IE doesn't support it, but IE doesn't have a proper extensions framework, so it's irrelevant to this topic.)
Since malicious attackers have complete control over the page you're seeing - they can simply replace document.createElement with their own function. And instead of returning a DOM object, they can return an object that returns whatever they want in .hostname
If the website could override extension functions, attacks would already be possible by overriding Regex functions.
For desktop browser extensions that are properly using the frameworks, the extension's Javascript runs in its own execution context so the page cannot redefine variables. This protected 1Password when we discovered that a certain page had redefined the global JSON object, which provides parse and stringify functions among other things, to be the number 3, i.e. a numeric constant called JSON. :'D
The same attack you describe could be applied to basically any javascript you cared to write (say, String.prototype.length). The safest approach is to treat the output of injected javascript as untrusted third-party input to your extension code and work from there.
If so, I am a little taken back by LastPass only offering $1,000 to the researcher that found and reported it for fixing. He or she could have taken a different path and resulted in this being used in some complex targeted attack against tech corporations via short-url redirect interstitial pages, or an ad network's javascript, etc. Given the potential damage, I'd say there is a missing zero or two on that reward amount, in my opinion.
I've been defending LastPass and recommending it to everyone till today. Now I'm thinking about how I might have to 'pay' for a software vulnerability in some private (read:unauditable by me) code. All the comments about offline, local backups make sense to me.
But the points I usually make are still valid, like:
1. I can go to any computer with chrome and get access to all my passwords, so don't have to carry my passwords with me everywhere.
2. Don't have to worry about storing passwords properly since lastpass is a good company and they know their stuff about protecting the customers' data.
3. Password capture. It might seem like a tiny feature, but I'm too lazy to remember opening an app and entering my credentials whenever I create an account or login into an old account.
4. Mobile login, although a paid feature, this really changes my life. If I don't trust a computer enough to login via chrome or something else, or want my secret notes, I just open up my phone.
But all the above features meaning nothing when it comes to the chance of compromising all my passwords (except bank info, of course)
I'd like to hear the thoughts of anyone else who uses lastpass and what they think.
(to save a click: Tavis Ormandy: "Are people really using this lastpass thing? I took a quick look and can see a bunch of obvious critical problems. I'll send a report asap.")
Full report sent to LastPass, they're working on it now. Yes,
it's a complete remote compromise. Yes, I promise I'll look at
1Password.> @taviso Are you looking at their binary? (I'm a former lastpass engineer)
> @ejcx_ Yes.
> @taviso Ahhh. I never touched it. Very neglected. There's a lot of stuff between message passing between extension and binary that is scary
I think the company should have paid $100,000.
Furthermore, the current live version on Firefox addons repository is 3.x [3], which the LastPass team claims is not vulnerable. [1]
[1] https://blog.lastpass.com/2016/07/lastpass-security-updates.... [2] https://labs.detectify.com/2016/07/27/how-i-made-lastpass-gi... [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lastpass-pass...
Does anyone know why that is the case? It seems like this exploit is just taking advantage of the js that autofills forms on the page based on domain. You can still use autofill if you have multifactor enabled.
[0] https://helpdesk.lastpass.com/multifactor-authentication-opt...
I don't actually use LastPass so I'm not 100% sure, but this would be the most likely case imo
This would seem like a logical assumption, but I have found that it works differently (at least on the firefox plugin). If I have auto-fill enabled, the password for a site I am looking at is filled in before the MFA prompt pops up. I can even ignore the MFA pop-up and click login and get into the website.
It's just a tiny overhead to my workflow.
You can also likely mitigate some of this by setting a fairly low autologoff timeout, though how well that will work may vary widely depending on how different people use the Web.
An example is Vault [0].
Encryptr [1] is another alternative: it claims that "all of your data will be saved in encrypted format in our Zero Knowledge [2] cloud".
[0] https://github.com/hashicorp/vault
Zero knowledge is merely the fact that spider oak only holds encrypted backups of your files and it has no way of seeing them. LastPass tells us the same thing.
There are fair number of open source alternatives that allow you to store secrets in the cloud:
vault: https://github.com/hashicorp/vault
blackbox: https://github.com/StackExchange/blackbox
git-crypt: https://www.agwa.name/projects/git-crypt/
Pass: http://www.zx2c4.com/projects/password-store/
Transcrypt: https://github.com/elasticdog/transcrypt
Keyringer: https://keyringer.pw/
git-secret: https://github.com/sobolevn/git-secret var fixedURL = URL.match(/^(.*:\/\/[^\/]+\/.*)@/);
fixedURL && (url = url.substring(0, fixedURL[1].length) + url.substring(fixedURL[1].length).replace(/@/g, "%40"));
* fidexURL is whatever is after :// and up until the very last @ (greediness)
* the second line fixedURL && is going to complete if fixedURL is not undefined
* url = this fixedURL, then the rest of it where @ was replaced by %40
so basically, entering http://avlidienbrunn.se/@twitter.com/@hehe.php will give
url = avlidienbrunn.se/@twitter.com/%40hehe.php
if I understand correctly. What happens after?
EDIT: it must be that the last [^/.]* before @ is taken as the domain name. But why splitting the URL before a @ sign? I'm confused
[1] https://www.dashlane.com/download/Dashlane-Security-Whitepap...
Why isn't PasswordSafe more popular ? What do other password managers have that Password Safe does not ?
The open questions are a) how long the flaw existed prior to being fixed and b) whether attackers were able to exploit the flaw.
Update: Looks like LastPass has made a blog regarding the exploit and have stated v3 of the addon is not affected [1]. Would be nice to have further clarification of the differences between v3 and v4 with regard to this.
[1] https://blog.lastpass.com/2016/07/lastpass-security-updates....
http://www.zdnet.com/article/lastpass-zero-day-vulnerability...
Anyway, I'm glad that LastPass has resolved this; last thing I want in the news is another big password breach.
http://ronnie.me/store-encrypted-passwords-in-an-encrypted-f...
The issue I had with 'pass' was that it leaked info via the file names, but I found a nice way around that.
Update: after a few answers to my badly thought through comment, I now feel enlightened. The attack scenario is a malicious web site which can gobble up my passwords. Thanks
1. Writes up that post.
2. Inserts an iframe in the post, which enumerates known sites. (hidden out of view with css tricks)
3. Instead of alerting on screen, sends the results back to their server.
4. Submits to HN.
So no, I don't think it will only give you your own passwords.
Running as a separate application outside the browser is 95% as easy thanks to auto-type.
"Also, this would not work if multi factor authentication was on, so you should probably enable that as well."
If you have something as important as a password manager (ie something that holds the keys to ... everything), then MFA is a must. If you use LastPass without MFA, then you're probably asking for trouble.
On the other hand, using regexp to parse the URL when it's such an obviously security critical code path... just, why?!
Why not? URIs are at least able to be tokenized perfectly well by a regular expression. You have to do it right, but there's little guarantee that your non-regexp code will do it right either. I glanced at that regexp and immediately recognized several potential problems with it... will I be able to do that with your non-regexp code?
To concretize the "several potential problems": 1. You generally don't want to parse arbitrary protocols, you should do something like (http|https|file) or whatever set of protocols you are ready to receive. Usually you're better off treating anything else as "not a URL", but consult your local security context for details. 2. Failing that, you want at the very least .⁎? to stop matching at the first :, or if your engine doesn't have that, the protocol ought to be matched with something much tighter like [a-z]+. And I do mean + and not ⁎, because you probably don't mean to support an empty protocol before the colon. (You may mean to permit URLs with no protocol, but that's (.⁎?:)? .) 3. Domains should be parsed more tightly than "not a slash". 4. Also, I have no idea what the @ was doing there. Perhaps it was trying to be $; URL parsing should always end with the "end of string" matcher to avoid problems similar to this. It should also start with the start-of-string matcher, which this one doesn't, for similar reasons. 5. Bonus critique, anything using regular expressions to URL-encode or decode is very suspicious; strongly prefer built-in functions that do this.
I literally saw all this faster than I could type it; does your non-regular-expression based code have this property?
Regular expressions aren't bad. They're hard to write properly, but still probably easier to write properly than anything else. It turns out the underlying problem is fundamentally hard.
(Had to use an alternate asterisk to get the RE expressions correct with HN trying to format it.)
Why not? Sure, you can't accuse them of being dishonest, but why would simply announcing an action make it beyond reproach?
It's far too low to motivate a lot of people to look for bugs, and to me suggests they're not serious about protecting their reputation if someone does find such a company-destroying bug.
Have you got a mechanism you could post here for them to do so?
Using something illegally means you run the risk of going to prison. Let's say there's a 1% chance you get caught, the prison sentence is 10 years, and the evil hackers will pay you $20,000 for your bug. Let's also say that you're a mid-career software engineer in the US, and over the next 10 years you expect to make $2M (after taxes).
This means your expected outcome over 10 years is $20,000 + (0.99 * $2M) = $1.98M. With Lastpass's bounty you end up with $2.001M.
With these assumptions, you should be paying Lastpass to find bugs in their software! Of course, if you're not in the US, you probably make a more reasonable salary (read: less), taxes are higher, and the risk of getting caught is lower.
That would be $300K per year pre-tax (assuming current 2016 tax rate of 33% for the 200-400K bracket). Is that really a normal mid-career salary?
I need to change jobs if that's the case...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_criminals paints a picture that prison time is mostly a US-only thing.
Some people want to watch the burn. An attacker could make it known anonymously and LastPass will never recover from that onslaught.
I am a lot taken back by it. This wasn't a minor bug. I don't care if $1,000 was the published maximum payout under their bug bounty program - for something like this, the payout needs to be representative of the damage that would have been done to their reputation had this bug been discovered and exploited by bad actors. Given that reputation is everything in this space, any well-publicized incident using this would have effectively rendered the company dead within days.
Here's hoping they reconsider the award amount (though I'm certain they won't).
How long would you work for $1,000? Some days, a week, two? If you spend more than a week on this problem it seems not worth to report it... On the other hand, if you set the incentive for bug bounty too high I imagine all sorts of cranks pop up, that want to show off bugs that are not there, and resources will be bound to this task -- they have to be verified, and analyzed even if its a bogus report (and in the worst case it will not accomplish anything).
Where is the middle ground?
You might not work for long on a $1,000 problem, but other people sure will. College or high school students, people in a country with low salaries such as Ukraine...
It does seem like an extremely low bounty for a security bug that severe.
I mean, in a 100% libertarian world, this hole would have been put up for auction to the highest bidder and LastPass would have had to ensure they were the highest bidder in order to close up the hole and basically save their business.
I really don't wanna ask the companies for money but it just seem so... underwhelming for me. (3 out of 3 rather big companies just gave some thanks)
It would be like someone walking up to you on the street, handing you something they think is valuable, and then hoping that you'll want it and pay them for it.
The first thing you should do is check and see if they have an official bug bounty, if they don't then contact them and ask them if they had one.. say something like "because you saw some things on their site that concerned you, but wanted to know if it was worth the time exploring further" .. this is assuming you already found something. The goal of this is to get them to try and offer a bounty.
If they don't offer a bounty, then if you want to be responsible, you can just disclose their vulnerabilities to them, and accept whatever thanks you get.
If you're explicitly doing what you're doing to try and get some money out of it, then your time would be better spent focusing on companies that have well published bug bounties.
When LastPass gets breached, they're not directly responsible for what an attacker does with the passwords.
When another site/service gets breached, they have to spend a lot of time making it right to the customer again (e.g. rolling back transactions, compensating for lost or stolen funds, etc.)
I think it works the other way around.
But I don't think it's worth getting excited about a single lastpass bug. Everything is vulnerable. There will be more of them. Chrome itself had 105 security issues, just this year (https://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?...) - a few of them potentially leading to your passwords being exposed without any extensions.
Upgrade often, don't do stupid stuff, keep backups, and you'll be more secure than 99% of people. Evaluate your choices from there.
Well, that put it in perspective for me. I just googled the vulnerabilities in offline password managers like Keepass/X and 1Password. And oh man, I was pretty shocked to see even the offline ones could be broken into.
I think I just had a crisis of faith.
>you'll be more secure than 99% of people
Thanks. I guess since I don't store very sensitive info (financial, etc.), and the important services - Google, Github, Atlassian, AWS use 2FA. I guess I don't have to be paranoid.
I love it how I get to decide who or what gets to see the encrypted file.
Now hopefully the Keepass audit will not reveal any issues in the encryption.
For example. I use KeePass to store all my password. I keep my KeePass database in Google Drive, so any change to the file will be updated. because of that I can use KeePass on any machine that has access to Google Drive (I also keep executables for various systems in drive). Furthermore, there are number of free mobile applications for KeePass which can hook into GDrive and you can use KeePass on the phone too. And lastly - browser extensions which let you use your KeePass to automatically fill & save passwords (I don't use it, though).
Sure, KeePass requires a bit more of an effort compared to all-in-one solutions such as LastPass. That is the price you pay for not thinking about possible security breaches in the cloud.
Maybe a computer you can trust but I wouldn't say any computer. I consider the shared PC you'd find in a hotel business center to be the digital equivalent of a diseased hooker. I'd be impressed if it didn't have a key logger installed.
> 2. Don't have to worry about storing passwords properly since lastpass is a good company and they know their stuff about protecting the customers' data.
Not being OSS I don't think that can be proven. It boils down to "Trust us, we're smart".
> I'd like to hear the thoughts of anyone else who uses lastpass and what they think.
Trust noone and put your faith in OSS (KeepassX, pass, etc).
I think you'll be impressed in a lot of cases than. I would be surprised if more than 15% of shared PCs have keyloggers active on them.
Still doesn't mean i'm going to login to anything on them though.
I don't mean to be the advice bird, but maybe you can point all the points you made to your superiors and make them re-evaluate their choice. If they're a huge enterprise, then I understand
This bug doesn't seem to have anything to do with the cloud.
FTA:
> The bug that allowed me to extract passwords was found in the autofill functionality.
Don't use a password manager, remember your passwords, or reset them all the time. It's a conceptual vulnerability, and if you read hacker news you are better than this.
Like with all decisions this is balancing risk/reward. The reward are all the points you have already expressed that I also love about LastPass. Currently I believe the risk is fairly minimal assuming you use 2 factor-authentication. Though I might turn off autofill now as an extra precaution.
This was a client-side bug and so surely doesn't depend on the fact that your passwords are 'stored in someone else's cloud'?
i.e. If there was only local storage of passwords this vulnerability would still be there.
(Also worth noting that lastpass encrypts your remote and local store with a key which is presumably only stored hashed and salted on their side)
The idea is good, just not sure about SHA-256...
Where a regex must be used, there is a reference regex for parsing URL: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#appendix-B
Edit: a permalink to demonstrate the above reference regex: https://regex101.com/r/yJ5nU4/1 -- would have prevented the LastPass bug.
Verbal Expressions - It's an extremely good higher level interface to the underlying regular expressions tools, in MANY languages.
Including:
JavaScript - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/JSVerbalExpressions
ActionScript 3 - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/AS3VerbalExpressions
Clojure - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/ClojureVerbalExpression...
C++ - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/CppVerbalExpressions
C# - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/CSharpVerbalExpressions
Dart - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/DartVerbalExpressions
Elixir - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/ElixirVerbalExpressions
Elm - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/elm-verbal-expressions
Erlang - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/ErlangVerbalExpressions
FreeBasic - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/FreeBasicVerbalExpressi...
F# - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/FSharpVerbalExpressions
Go - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/GoVerbalExpressions
Groovy - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/GroovyVerbalExpressions
Haskell - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/HaskellVerbalExpression...
Haxe - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/HaxeVerbalExpressions
Java - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/JavaVerbalExpressions
Lua - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/LuaVerbalExpressions
Objective C - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/ObjectiveCVerbalExpress...
Perl - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/PerlVerbalExpressions
PHP - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/PHPVerbalExpressions
PowerShell - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/PowerShellVerbalExpress...
PureScript - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/purescript-verbal-expre...
Python - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/PythonVerbalExpressions
Racket - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/RacketVerbalExpressions
Ruby - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/RubyVerbalExpressions
Rust - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/RustVerbalExpressions
Scala - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/ScalaVerbalExpressions
Swift - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/SwiftVerbalExpressions
Vala - https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/ValaVerbalExpressions
And probably more, but that's just the "official" implementations.
Oh no, not this type of comment again. Infosec people always make fun of HN for this exact type of comment. The total lack of understanding of the economics of bug hunting doesn't stop people from commenting here.
Noone is paying $100k in some imaginary black market for web exploits. I mean have you even considered who buys exploits and what type of attacks they conduct? There isn't an active market looking to noisily grab passwords from a low-grade consumer password manager that no enterprise or governments uses. Your XSS/SQLi are only worth a marginal amount of money to the corporation you're pen testing.
And supply/demand is always what drives prices, not the potential damage (or benefit) you can imagine a particular exploit doing. This is as true for vulnerabilities as it is for some business software or mobile app your create. Just because in a perfect situation it could generate x value for a customer doesn't mean there is either demand or an untapped market for it.
A browser-based iPhone zero-day on the other hand can fetch some money. But even then your grey market for this is tiny and most likely not going to be some criminal overlord paying out $100k in bitcoin to kids on a darknet forum.
However, I still stand behind that this corporation should have paid $100,000. There are so many opportunities to exploit this vulnerability. LastPass is seen as something "advanced" users use, so it's highly probable that you could PM link to this page to some computer celebrity, and you would have access to his inbox in no-time, because most people don't use annoying second-factor authorization. This could result in a huge amount of new leaks, etc, etc. $1000 basically screams - "fuck you, we don't care about our security, and we are not going to encourage future white hat future bug reporting".
You're right, it's usually in low-mid $10ks for this sort of thing.
>low-grade consumer password manager that no enterprise or governments uses
Can't speak to government, but multiple large companies I have worked for have mandated LastPass as the password manager.
> But even then your grey market for this is tiny and most likely not going to be some criminal overlord paying out $100k in bitcoin to kids on a darknet forum.
In fact that's almost exactly what it is, except you've underestimated the price. A really juicy iOS RCE or Privesc can fetch almost half a million.
These transactions aren't usually done on forums, though. Not enough trust. There are middlemen who buy exploits from researchers and sell to the big customers.
I think of it like drugs. $50k street value of cocaine is not going to do me a lot of good because 1) I'd have no idea where to sell it, 2) if I did know where, I wouldn't have the relationships built and would probably get ripped off/killed/what-have-you, and 3) selling drugs isn't something I'd like to do. So, if there were an option of turning in the drugs to the police for $500, I would take that instead.
Side-note: isn't there a grey market that buys exploits (for sums of ~$100k depending on the exploit) and sells them to government agencies or larger corporations? I think I remember one company charged $500k / year to companies and government agencies who wanted access to their "exploit database". Seems like this is the best route to go with these kinds of exploits since it is completely legal.
In the sense that "Oh yeah, I just casually stumbled on an enormous exploit of security software" the bounty is a good deal. In the sense that "Should I look for holes in this thing? Is it worth my time?" it's absolutely not unless the person is interested in it academically or for reputation.
Fixing this bug before an exploit is worth a LOT to the company. I think they have a moral obligation to pay more than 1k to fix it.
I also think it makes sense to award good-sized bounties, as at this point I would have no interest in their bounty program, were I hunting bounties.
This is more akin to finding the accounting records of a drug kingpin that could be used as evidence to bring them down. This could have destroyed Lastpass.
I think the bounty should be: 10000 < bounty <= 100,000
This bug would have been exploited, sooner or later, and would have had massively disastrous results. Those results are now avoided, and that's worth a lot more than 1k.
And all you have to do is risk your freedom.
It targets the local autofill functionality in the browser, so it could conceivably have occurred in any password manager with browser/autofill integration. Including those that use a local password store.
password reuse < own memory/manual storage < synced unencrypted 3rd party storage < synced encrypted 3rd party storage < custom encrypted storage < some custom crazy HSM which doesn't allow you to get more than X passwords per minute and notifies you on each get()
There's another dimension for cross-platform support somewhere in there. At the moment if you want your passwords saved and shared between desktops and mobiles, the best solution I'm aware of is 1password with separate sync (dropbox/icloud) - and you're still trusting the 1password app. You can go further, but you're starting to destroy usability on the way. Lastpass / 1password is still a valid choice that's better than many alternatives.
It works pretty well. Different password for each site, I only have to remember a few things, and it would take several compromises (and a weirdly dedicated attacker) to work out my algorithm.
For example, my 'insecure' fixed part might be 'Tenk5$' (I recommend including uppercase, lowercase, a number and a symbol in that part to get around idiotic password requirements). Then my algorithm could be 'the last 5 letters backwards, skip the first vowel'. In which case my password for HN would be 'Tenk5$rtani'.
It stores your data locally, is suprisingly easy to use and relies on battle tested GPG.
From the website: "The community has even produced a cross-platform GUI client, an Android app, an iOS app, a Firefox plugin, a Windows client, a pretty Python QML app, a nice Go GUI app, an interactive console UI, Alfred integration (1) (2) (3), a dmenu script, OS X integration, git credential integration, and even an emacs package."
Or there could be several modes and a database of websites that automatically picks a mode based on the website. Which leaves you remembering modes in the worst case scenario, or trying a few of them out.
I think an acceptable solution can be made by analysing the password requirements of the top N websites, then coming up with a good scheme that works on most, and an alternate scheme that works on the rest. One mistake is usually allowed everywhere.
The string "foo" correctly gets parsed as a path (group 5). However the string "foo;key:value" gets parsed as a "foo;key" scheme (group 1,2) and a "bar" path (group 5) by the regular expression, but as a path if you follow the grammar.
scheme = ALPHA *( ALPHA / DIGIT / "+" / "-" / "." )
vs.
^(([^:\/?#]+):)?
:; are reserved characters, but they do not need to be encoded when they are a part of the path.
So yeah, don't use regular expressions for parsing.
How many times have people had to pay you not to commit felonies that are a) immoral, and b) could land you in jail?
I think most people don't need monetary encouragement not to turn black hat.
The untrusted script can override its own view of createElement, but not the extension's view.
I wonder if a DOM mutation event would be triggered if a content script adds a new link element and changes it's href.
Would I be able to catch that and quickly change the href, before the content script continues to fecth the processed properties?
In other words, I don't believe bug bounties incentivize people who would otherwise not already be looking, but it gives them a safe outlet and official validation that they can put on their resume/website/whatever.
It's probably not worth attempting to convince certain people. Not only Encryptr, but even other ones [0].
Oh, and I'm not even remotely affiliated with SpiderOak.
What's happening is that this extension auto filling the password in unintended sites. Where it is getting passwords from (offline or from cloud) is immaterial for this case.
This bug could easily occur in Chrome/Firefox's built-in password manager autofill, though I must admit I have slightly more implicit trust of the developers behind Chrome/Firefox than of Lastpass (instinctively; this may well be unwarranted).
This matters because even if it's client-side encryption, the encryption code just got downloaded when you opened the site so if the server or the network was compromised, you got compromised. [0]
With Keepass, the only time you run that risk is when you download Keepass.
[0] As far as I can tell, this is the core argument of tptacek's "javascript crypto considered harmful" rant (https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/b...). I'm not sure, because it's written worse than his most drunken HN comment, but I believe it is.
The lack of integration then with the rest of the OS is actually a security benefit.
Probably doesn't work out, but it's what came to mind as a way to deal with the balancing act.
That was an actual argument on a thread about Facebook underpaying bounties.
1. "Salt" my email usernames with the name of the service (johndoe+reddit@example.com)
2. Use multiple (long) password bases depending on the type of service (eg website vs app)
3. Combine the password bases with a cipher/salt based on the service name and my username
I'm guilty of not rotating passwords on a regular basis, however.
Depending on the type of service, `password_base` changes. For example, HN uses a separate one from Gmail for Business. Likewise, `service_cipher` and `username_cipher` are simply that: truncated ciphers of the service name and username. Lastly, `special_chars` is used for pesky sites that want special characters outside the range provided by my password base.
I'd like to think my system is very difficult for someone to crack without gaining access to a large number of passwords. The only limitation is that a few sites have limits on password length(!) which requires using a shorter base or even truncating the password entirely.
Integrating with the browser is probably a bad idea, it shortens the exploit path from a webpage to your password store.
Using a standalone application and using the clipboard would require a malicious website to break out of the browser and then break into the password store process, which could in principle run under a different user and interact with the clipboard through some broker process.
Context: I'm a new 1Password user who is contemplating use of the extensions for those latter two browsers, and while it seems probable their extension frameworks offer the level of security you describe, I'd like to be certain before pulling the trigger. Thanks!
Hi there!
Yes, all 3 of the major browsers (and derivatives of them) offer the same support for a sandboxed execution environment. You can safely use any of them if that's a requirement you have :)
Kyle
AgileBits
We really try not to call it "Classic" or anything like that. It's standalone, you're in charge of upgrades, syncing and backups and stuff like that. It's also not designed for sharing (at least to the degree of the Family and Team solutions).
That said, we don't have any immediate plans to remove the standalone products. However, if a vast majority of our users switch to 1Password Family or 1Password Teams (and as of today, an Individual plan!) then it doesn't make a ton of sense to keep the standalone product around. So, it's probably one of those speak with your wallet kind of scenarios.
I'll certainly pass your feedback along, it sounds like you'd like to keep it around.
I hope that helps answer your question :)
Kyle
AgileBits
See this pastebin[1] for the function I believe is determining the url of the active tab and if it has a valid hostname.
There's also this one[2] that seems to be extracting the hostname of a given url also using the URL API.
Both these pastebins contain minimized code that I've cleaned up.
0: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/URL
LastPass (on Chrome) will auto-fill information on a detected site, which a malicious site can read immediately.
1Password (on Chromium nightly) requires me to hit the 1Password Mini button and select a site/account to log in with. If 1Password had a similar vulnerability, a malicious site as described would merely wind up showing me accounts for the wrong site in the dropdown. Clicking one could wind up submitting/leaking my credentials to the attacker, though.
This is actually how I use 1Password most often. Global hotkey of cmd+opt+\, type a site name, hit enter: 1Password opens the site and logs in.
I think an official word holds more clout and is more valuable than any one person confirming for themselves in one version of one browser on one version of one OS.
I understand that, as a user of 1Password's browser extension(s), you may well feel some concern that a similar vulnerability exists, and I don't think it's unreasonable to want reassurance on that score.
But I think your phrasing and framing of the question feels a lot more like a "gotcha" than anything else, and it's that feeling which motivated my prior comment - I'm not an AgileBits dev myself, but if I were, I'd feel strongly inclined to shy away from that question rather than trying to frame an answer that doesn't leave me open to a potentially hostile followup.
Presumably that's the job of a professional security developer that might reasonably be expected to have checked their own similar product for this vulnerability...
Some need Lower-/Uppercase, some with numbers, some with special Chars, some restrict to minimum of x chars, some use a maximum.
Your system works not for all things, i use a similar system, but store a bunch of passwords with last pass. Only really important passwords are in my head.
That has not worked well for me. I have lost a small amount of bitcoin, and some encrypted homedirs and encrypted hard drives.
I keep meaning to collate idiotic password rules so you can see for sure which patterns work in all of them, but I've never got around to it.
Use that algorithm widely enough and several compromises are guaranteed. The only thing protecting your password is that url manipulation.
Further to that though, we now know that this problem is fixed in LastPass. We don't know about other password managers. To that end, LastPass is now a better option than it's rivals.
Only when you believe that all password managers are equally secure from the start.
There are many reasons to believe that this is not the case. Storing passwords in a cloud service is quite a red flag. Then there is a former employee stating on Twitter that part of the codebase is very neglected:
I put more/less secure in scare quotes, because my point is really that fixing one particular bug certainly closes that one particular attack vector, but security is not a progress bar that goes from 0 to 100.
What this write-up does in my mind is really highlight the risks that come along with using a complex piece of software to manage your passwords. We tell users they can use password managers to safeguard their passwords and increase their security. We talk a lot about the usability trade-offs which password managers entail, but perhaps not as much about the security trade-offs!
Um...it was a really stupid mistake. Writing your own bug-prone regex here instead of using an existing, trustworthy function is just really bad. Especially when the consequences of a bug mean a hacker can steal someone's passwords.
You should really hope that any company that prides itself (and bases itself) on security would never release this bug. It absolutely lowers the reputation of lastpass.
Anyway, I gave up on both 1Password and LastPass. I've been a 1Password user for about 2 years before I switched to KeePass.
To be more specific, for the desktop (OS X, Linux, Windows) I use: https://keeweb.info/
For Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=keepass2androi...
And for iOS, though be warned this one is subpar: http://minikeepass.github.io/
All 3 apps are open-source. This is important because open-source will not die for as long as there is demand and more importantly, you own it.
No, I'm NOT against proprietary software, as I said, I gladly paid a premium for 1Password. However their Windows client is basically unmaintained, their new "modern Windows" app is still alpha and doesn't work with Wine and of course, they have no Linux support. Most aggravating is that they are clearly switching to a subscription model, with all of their development effort going towards it lately. No more Everywhere interface for OpVault, no new sync options other than Dropbox and iCloud, etc. In other words I'm tired of bait and switch models and one is in progress here.
But the real important thing to consider is whether the protection you would get from a hosted solution so above and beyond overkill that it matters?
If you're curious why I feel that way, we have written up a white paper on how 1Password Teams (and therefore Families and now Individuals) stores and secures your data.
https://1password.com/files/1Password%20for%20Teams%20White%...
We designed 1Password so that we cannot know anything about your data. We also designed it knowing full well that our servers would be a target. So, we designed it in such a way that if a malicious person were to acquire your data there's more or less nothing they can do to acquire the decrypted data.
What we settled on is having two secrets. Both of which are not known by us. The first is your Master Password, something that you're likely well aware of having used 1Password already. The second part is an Account Key, which is a random 128-bit key generated locally. These two things are never given to us and should never be shared. They are both used for the cryptographic functions in 1Password. Without them both, you can't see the decrypted data.
This is unique in that it actually protects weak master passwords. That's the big deal to worry about if our database of user data is compromised. The first attack is to start running password cracking tools against it to try to find the weak passwords. Except in this case, there are no weak passwords because even if your master password is "a" the attacker still needs your Account Key, which looks something like this:
A3-Z4JZ6V-P9BALK-S6J69-FAXCN-LTDY8-T3QHJ
So, now a password cracker is going to have to guess all those combinations of weak passwords against something much much stronger as well. I wish them luck because the math more or less makes this impossible if a user uses a strong master password as well.
There's some math in the white paper if you're curious about more.
Knowing how it works and how extremely unlikely it is that I am such a target that someone is going to literally spend millions upon millions of dollars trying to crack my account (and still likely get nowhere)... I'm small fish, it just isn't worth it to even try.
Either way, for the sake of learning (I love learning, so I always assume others do as well), I would recommend reading the white paper, if not only to gain some new knowledge that you may not have been exposed to previously. If you have, awesome!
As always, if you have questions let me know!
Kyle
AgileBits
It is $2.99/mo when billed annual ($3.99/mo month to month), includes all of the applications as part of the subscription price.
It is otherwise based on the same technology as Family and Teams options. It's basically Families with only 1 user.
It is true. See documentation => https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/content_scripts#exec... :
> Content scripts execute in a special environment called an isolated world. They have access to the DOM of the page they are injected into, but not to any JavaScript variables or functions created by the page. ... The same is true in reverse
[0] http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/network/2005/11/01/avoid-co...
https://mathiasbynens.be/demo/url-regex
https://lostechies.com/chadmyers/2010/11/20/parsing-a-url-wi...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27745/getting-parts-of-a...
What do all these have in common? They all demonstrate that it is hard to write a regex that parses URLs.
Regex's hide programming mistakes because they not only become harder for humans to parse as they get more complicated, but also there isn't simple programming code to handle potential security vulnerabilities in-line with the code. It also hides the [at least] two considerations of secure programming: designing a secure function, and handling the function securely.
You can't look at regexs in isolation, see that a task is hard, then declare them unfit. You have to consider them as one of the many choices and analyze the cost/benefits of the whole suite of options.
I guarantee you that anyone who has said "Oh, gosh, this is hard, I'll just start using indexOf and substring operations" has written code that is just as broken, only in ways much harder to tell.
Which is probably why everyone here thinks it's better to not use regex. You didn't write better code... you wrote code that hid its brokenness better. That's not a good thing!
Again, my real point here is not "regexes are awesome in every way"... my point is that I literally glanced at that code and saw several ways in which it was wrong. Does your alternative have that property?
Also, some of the difficulties of regexes are accidental, not essential. Take something like the recent Perl 6 efforts for parsing and you're far better off in every way using that stuff than trying to bash together string-manipulation-based parsing, or whatever other alternatives you may be thinking of. The Perl 6 constructs will be more readable and more maintainable. (Perl 6 is crazy in a lot of ways but the parsing support is best-of-breed.)
A while back I whipped this up: https://gist.github.com/pmarreck/2956396
which seemed to work well (although it was a bit slower, I probably didn't know about exponential backtracking at the time and that could probably be revisited). It won't gather multiple name/value pairs though, but it will cut out and name basically every other part of the URL.
"Why not? URIs are at least able to be tokenized perfectly well by a regular expression."
"5. Bonus critique, anything using regular expressions to URL-encode or decode is very suspicious; strongly prefer built-in functions that do this."
And the problem is probably more accurately stated as "be suspicious of any function implementing encoding or decoding" rather than focusing on the regex part. Use the correct standard function. Don't bash something together yourself. They're actually pretty easy functions to write if you know what you're doing, but it's even easier to use some tested already-existing function. In fact, it's so easy that the fact that you see someone bashing together a URL encoding or decoding function almost certainly proves that they don't know what they are doing, which in turn means the URL encoding or decoding function was written by someone who doesn't know what they are doing. Unsurprisingly, these are, well, to quote myself, "suspicious".
Yes, that logic applies to URL parsing as well! Unfortunately, browsers make URL parsing extra hard, which is really stupid, so you end up with more crap in Javascript than anywhere else. Even then you ought to prefer someone else's tested solution over just smashing out a regular expression; however, it is not a knock on the tested solution if it is a regular expression-based solution.
This article is a perfect example of why not.
Of course it's illegal/wrong to sell an exploit to third parties, but that doesn't stop people from doing illegal things as long as they get money for it. You just don't know about the issues that are sold because that's obviously not going public.
(This is of course orthogonal to the fact that the black market does not want these vulnerabilities.)
Criminals will always be looking, but the odds of finding vulns against a company that pays decent bounties should be far lower than against one paying a pittance, since more people should be looking due to the greater potential reward.
Also, in this case, I think that the amount of damage the company has avoided due to the vuln leaking through non-responsible disclosure is far more than $1000. Deleting photos on FB is nowhere near the same class of seriousness.
The company STORES PASSWORDS. Leaking them is serious.
Felonies exist and people still commit them. Should they? God no. But people with a lower moral code exist and they can be flipped to do "good work" if there's enough money for them (and I think you should get more money in general for your important work anyway). I find the notion of your profession only consisting of good people highly offending to the rest of the world.
You might also want to check the definition of "simple". Probably doesn't mean what you think it means.
I have sent a message to 1Password through the official customer support channel to ask the same question posed here. I'll update once they reply.
> Thank you for taking the time to write to us here at AgileBits. The current version of the 1Password extension does not use regex to parse URLs for this exact reason. We don't autofill either, which also helps avoid issues like the one you mentioned.
1: Defensiveness. It seemed more like an honest question than a pot shot. You seemed to read into it something like "Aha! How about your software fool!?!"
That said, if it were a reporter asking the question, then I would see it as a gotcha, because the use of the word confirm is used as a setup sometimes.
2: Tech bias. Not everyone on here is a Dev, and even though I know a fair bit about programming it would not be a trivial task to do what is simple for you regarding checking out code injections and what they do re a security standpoint. That would probably be a long afternoon of googling for me :)
Just my view...
The purpose of a bug bounty is to incentivize researchers to target specific pieces of software so that vendors can benefit from that attention.
If you're a 10 you will disclose responsibly regardless of a bounty, and if you're a 1 you will disclose to the highest bidder. The rest will weight profit, ethics, and risk in some ratio depending on where they fall on the scale and decide to act based on that calculation.
The company has to price their bounty on a few factors: how much they can afford to pay, how much a bug is worth to them (eg damage to their reputation, fines in the event of a vulnerability), and how important it is and to have researchers looking at their product instead of another product.
I agree with you that companies should not be required to pay people to prevent them from launching criminal conspiracies. But this is not a perfect world and people are not so black and white in their actions and motivations. There is no point trying to optimize your bounty program for the 1's or the 10's. Therefore, when optimizing for the rest it makes sense to pay as much as possible within the constraints I mentioned (in the previous paragraph) in order to tip the scales in your favor for the largest part of the spectrum possible. Right now the tech community knows about this problem with LastPass. If this exploit had made it to the wild things would've been much worse for them from a PR perspective.
I am hoping that the $1000 cap on the bounty program came from careful consideration of these factors, but my gut tells me it was a number handed down from management.
Your rationale would be a valid rebuttal in your world no matter what the amounts in question were. $500? Incentive! $50? Incentive!
As we can see from avlidienbrunn2's response [1] sometimes it's not about the money. It's just fulfilling a natural curiosity about a product, maybe getting your killer write-up of a shocking bug to hit the top of the HN frontpage, etc. So in this case perhaps the bounty program is as much about establishing a legal structure for a whitehat to operate under than to fairly compensate ad hoc pen-testers. I wish they paid 10x or more for this bug. But I'm glad at least pen-testers can report these bugs without [as much] fear of reprisal.
Personally I lost a lot of confidence in them when they got acquired and switched to 1Password, paying very low bounties for critical security flaws further hurts my confidence in them.
From my vantage point, the logical conclusion to the comment you just wrote is that companies should avoid offering bug bounties. They just attract negative attention.
(I won't use LastPass, and have recommended 1Password --- but Tavis Ormandy is looking at 1Password right now, and I'm guessing they're going to end up disappointing HN too.)
So the end effect is more bugs found by "white hats" rather than "black hats" because the bounty has focused the "white hat" efforts on your program. (Or encouraged them to look at all.)
I'm likely to poke around a site with a bug bounty even with small sums just because it hints at a more formal process and also likely means they have a sensible policy about not going after testers.
Bug bounties are as much about signalling than encouraging "black hats" to suddenly turn to the light side.
Regardless, if a company isn't willing to demonstrate they value security to my satisfaction I won't be a customer.
The only problem I have is with the virulently bogus meme that companies should pay more for vulnerabilities because otherwise the "black market" will outbid them. No:
* The "black market" does not in fact want these vulnerabilities.
* Finding a vulnerability and then not using it to to enter into a criminal conspiracy simply isn't praiseworthy, and reasonable people don't have to paid not to do that. It's hard enough to do this kind of work in a society that believes there's something sketchy about finding vulnerabilities at all, without the constant chatter about how maybe they could just make a living by enabling crime.
* The argument doesn't even make logical sense. If the vulnerability is easy to find and exploit (as this one was), then no matter how severe it is, it doesn't command a high price because you could spend less money to independently rediscover it. Moreover, there are surely many other vulnerabilities to be found in the same target. The economics of the argument are all wrong.
You know who does fine in a world where that's the norm? Facebook. No matter where vulnerabilities get valued at, they will be a rounding error expense to Facebook.
You know who does not do fine in that world? Anyone smaller than Facebook.
Thankfully, that's not the norm in the real world. Unfortunately, the real norm is: if you pay a bounty at all, random people on Twitter and message boards will claim you're being negligent by not paying more for them. The lesson then is: don't offer a bug bounty. All you're doing is attracting negative attention.
You know who does fine in the real world where that's the norm? Apple and Cisco. Really, so does Facebook, despite the bullshit flak they take for their bounties.
You know who does not do fine in the real world? End-users.
That's a weight off...
I have no idea who you think you're replying to, but they're not my points dude...
No, suggesting otherwise is saying that a bounty program with high enough rewards can reach both legitimate security researchers and sketchy folks. This is in no way a slight on the first group.
I never trusted "cloud" (read: not yours) password stores. I have been using KeePass and manual syncing, but I had my doubts about it too.
This looks perfect and simple!
I use keepassx, which requires manual search, copy, paste but it can store its vault on a cloud drive, mobile etc. and can have a key file or password.
If you're interested, all our data formats are well documented for review: https://blog.agilebits.com/2013/03/06/you-have-secrets-we-do... You might also be interested in the security white paper for our hosted 1Password service: https://1password.com/security/ (White paper is linked at the bottom of the page.)
Here is their security white paper : https://www.dashlane.com/download/Dashlane-Security-Whitepap...
I found this alternative when LastPass was acquired by log me once. I was not happy with this. This app doesn't have hacking or vulnerability history like LastPass.
They also have a dedicated import for LastPass. https://www.enpass.io/docs/desktop-mac/import_lastpass.html
*every few major releases
(Apart from "don't use services that require you to share passwords for a single account". Alas.)
We can agree to disagree because the perspective really wasn't for you, it was for everyone else reading that will share a sentiment they've felt but never articulated
There are two kinds of vulnerabilities in the world:
The kind organized criminals will pay tens of thousands of dollars for, and the kind they, like any Internet rando, will pay $50 for lulz.
If you think this dumb regex bug is worth the same to organized criminals as a Chrome sandbox escape or drive-by reliable Flash RCE... well, people think that about a lot of bugs, I guess.
This LastPass bug is terrible. I was already inclined to warn friends against using it (but my other friends have beat me to that punch many times before). The bug looks terrible for LastPass and its mere existence is damaging to that project.
But that doesn't mean the bug has significant monetary value. As someone else here cleverly put it on the last dumb bug bounty thread: you can smash a car with a sledgehammer, but that doesn't make the sledgehammer worth the value of the car.
Perfect analogy, I'm putting that in my back pocket.
Bug bounty programs, presumably, prevent unsavory exploits at some point in the future. Having this responsibly disclosed was damaging still, but cost LastPass less money than having it exploited later.
I'm not sure where that falls on your "significance" scale.
So that seems like a reasonable way for people to share them. However, I only use it for myself so I may not have thought of all the gotchas.
Even if you don't hit the enter key/submit the form it is still possible for that incorrect window/app to grab your keystrokes.
It also doesn't try to NIH some complicated database format or syncing technology but instead uses well-established software (git, plain directory structure and gpg-encrypted text files) which makes it robust, flexible and future-proof, and also responsive to changes in cryptography as it benefits from upstream GnuPG updates. You can use any PGP key structure you want, or even hardware PGP devices like the YubiKey.
KeePass on the other hand seems to be based on mostly homegrown techniques written by people with no or limited understanding of cryptography. (see e.g. [0]) That said, I don't know how much KeePassX continues this trend - but it's based on the same file format so it presumably has to reimplement at least some of KeePass's homegrown crypto.
I don't know how much more convincing you need, but personally I wouldn't even dare consider using anything other than `pass`.
A system is as secure as its weakest component.
We have a dedicated LastPass import option. See here:
https://support.1password.com/import-lastpass/
If you encounter any trouble please write into support at agilebits dot com and mention "Kyle" somewhere in the body of the email and I'll get notified. You should be fine though, but every once in awhile we have someone encounter trouble with the import from LastPass.
I checked out the pricing model and didn't see anything that made sense to me as an individual user. Is there any plan for an affordable individual plan (in the range of 10-20$/ year)?
As a Mac/IOS user, I don't see myself shelling out 60$ for a desktop license and then another 10$ for an IOS license on top of it. I'm sure your profit margin is great, don't get me wrong, but as a buyer that is just overkill.
The hardest part of the migration for my parents were 1) demystifying the spaghetti mishmash my Dad had in place to manage his passwords, 2) getting Dropbox set up correctly between Mom & Dad for vault sharing, 3) training my Mom how to use, and 4) educating Data on how to manage website edge cases.
I would hope that 1PW has a LP migration tool, but if they don't, Dad was able to clean up his historical garbage one by one. The password capturing process in 1PW is good enough that this worked nearly seemlessly.
Finally, I've had nothing but positive results from posting questions in the 1PW forum.
Heck 1Password mostly works under Wine, except perhaps there is no unlock on Secure desktop and bunch of other usability things.
Yea, we hear you there. I (and others on the team) wish we could make this happen, but priorities are a tough one. Linux in general didn't fit all that great in our standalone license model before, along with being closed source. Now with the subscription option for individuals (new today), families and teams we have made the payment side a little less of a concern but we still have the closed source nature of things making Linux a harder target to hit.
We're probably in a better position now than before though. Every time I asked a Linux user who wasn't asking for this they said they had no interest in paying for closed source software. I wanted all the positive response I could get to show to the decision makers but I fell short in getting it.
This is all to say it's simply a complicated situation. It has to either make money to pay for its development, or the others have to offset it enough that it's a win for us so we can keep the lights on.
Hope that helps a little anyway. I know it's not the answer you wanted but I hate leaving people like yourself wondering why it feels like we aren't listening.
Kyle
AgileBits
If you have any questions that we might be able to answer, please shoot me an email. kyle at agilebits.com, or support at agilebits.com. I work on our Mac/iOS teams and security teams. I can probably answer most of your questions and at least get them in front of people who can answer them.
I really hope you're not making this work with AgileKeychain, we've put that one out to pasture. :)
Kyle
AgileBits
We've got pretty good OPVault support going, but your guys' RPC protocol is not open, right? Between mini and the browser plugins?
And also correct on the mini to extension protocol, there is no public documentation for that, primarily due to that being something we really need to be able to change as necessary.
We are really curious to see what you've come up with though :) So please keep me in the loop if possible!
Kyle
AgileBits
I can tell you one thing that is indisputably better about 1Password though.
Support.
Quite literally. We have a team of over 30 customer support personnel (in addition to myself and other developers who pitch in for a part of our day). We're here to help if you run into problems, encounter a bug, have feature requests, or generally just want questions answered about how we do things or why something is done the way it's done.
Keepass, as noble as it is to have an open source and free product, is run and improved by volunteers. I realize that not many people on hacker news really care that much about support since we're all typically very capable people, but as someone who has been with AgileBits for nearly 5 years now and seen a whole lot of the weird edge cases that can exist because some webpage is doing something incredibly weird or some particular computer setup is causing problems. It can be really helpful to know that there are people who can look into these things for you instead of having to know it yourself.
1Password does have a 30 day trial (both for our standalone product and for our individual/family/team subscriptions). You can try it yourself and see how it works for you. And as always, if you have questions during this time you're welcome to get in touch (support at agilebits.com, mention my name if you want and it'll notify me) and we'll help you get things setup. We think the product speaks for itself and we're happy to fill in any gaps if you need more :)
Kyle
AgileBits
I am actually not sure what I would need support for either, it seems pretty basic. I am simply storing passwords. It doesn't seem too complicated. And maybe this is because I am a tech person, so maybe I am looking for the more technical reasons why the software may be better rather than how the support excels. Because if keepass had a problem I know ways to get support anyway, either via a Stackexchange site or IRC. So I am definitely a bias group.
However I do not care if the software is open source or not. I know some people do care about that, but the people I talk to do not. People in my age group seem less concerned about open source or closed source.
I'm more curious if there are some kind of features in the product itself that make it better than keepass? I do not have a family so the family cloud version of 1password is not useful, though I would not be opposed to a cloud version of 1password for an individual. I currently store my keepass in dropbox and have that synced to all the devices I use.
I work remotely for my job. I do travel several times a year as a result and when I'm gone I have other family members watch my house. Before 1Password Families I had to find a way to easily get my wifi password, my garage door code, and various other instructions and information to whoever was watching my house.
With 1Password Families I simply create a vault in my Family, add my items to it and invite the person who will be watching my house as a guest (or in my most recent case, granted my brother access to the vault).
In the first case, the person simply signed up, installed 1Password and they had access to the data. In the second case, my brother simply unlocked 1Password and the vault was there.
When I get back home, I simply remove access and those things disappear from their devices. None of these are so important that I have to change them, but, that's another step as well if necessary.
But that is how easy it is to share and use vaults in 1Password Families (and Teams).
I also love that using this I can add family members, like my parents, and it handles all the syncing for them so I don't have to micro manage it with backups and other stuff. It's a far more seamless experience. And since I hold the keys to the family kingdom, I can also reset their master password for them if they forget it.
Now, you might think you have no use for this, and that's fine, but it's an example of how someone who doesn't have an immediate family (I'm single, and childless) was able to use 1Password Families in a way that wasn't obvious when I first set out to use it for myself.
In terms of features that differentiate us from Keepass, I have never used Keepass so I am not able to speak to what we do differently. I'm sure there are things each of us do better though.
There is a trial version of 1Password, so, you could use it and see how it stacks up for yourself. I'd be very curious what you find better or worse so I can pass that feedback along to our team. Completely optional of course.
Kyle
AgileBits
I'd say many people don't need the Pro features in the iOS version, it's possible that maybe you won't either? Depends on how you use it I guess. Probably the biggest reason to get the Pro features is multiple vault support (you can add additional vaults that were created from the desktop versions). With the free version you only get the one vault.
If you use the app like most people, you'll be using it dozens of times a day. Even if it's in small interactions those do add up. I've been trying to convince the team to add some sort of individual statistics that were stored locally for users to see, but I suspect this would probably help you decide that regardless of price it would be worth while :)
In the end, the choice is yours though. We certainly want to hit the price point for all users that we can, but we do have to keep the lights on or the product disappears. We aren't priced at a point where we're trying to acquire users in bulk so we can sell to another company. AgileBits is privately owned and has never taken outside funding. Something to be aware of when you're talking pricing I suppose. At least one factor.
Kyle
AgileBits
Purchasing 1Password for 65$ gets the current major release with no updates?
Subscribing to 1Password Families for 5$/month: Lets me sync passwords between all of my desktops and phones? Can I sync an encrypted password database or is this done as a hosted cloud solution by 1Password?
$65 gets you a single license for Mac and Windows. This can be installed on multiple Macs or PCs you own, but is generally for 1 single person.
You get all updates to 1Password 6 for Mac for free, and any updates to 1Password 4 for Windows for free. On the Mac side, we are planning a 6.5 release in the next couple months. Most of the changes in this release will center around 1Password Teams/Families/Individuals (the subscription option). Along with bug fixes that likely impact both. We are likely nearing the end of the road on version 6 after that.
With the $5/mo you can technically do two things...
1. You can use the hosted solution 2. You can create local vaults (like the standalone version does) and sync those using Dropbox, iCloud or Wifi (to mobile devices)
So, with the subscription option, you get both. Whether you use the hosted part of it or not is up to you. However, if the subscription goes into frozen state (unpaid) the app will go into Trial mode, which limits you unless you re-subscribe or purchase a standalone license.
I currently use both local vaults and the vaults for my work Team and Family account. Mostly the local vaults are for testing purposes but it all works fine with a subscription.
Let me know if that helps :)
Kyle
AgileBits
The installer gave me an option to create desktop icon, but gave me no option to start the program when it was finished installing. It was odd having to go find and run the program once it was done installing, it is typical for most installers to give me an option to run after install. Not a big deal, but I thought it was worth a mention.
When I opened up 1Password I clicked "I am new to 1Password", and noticed that the prompt to select a location to store my keychain is under the program itself. This is annoying as I have to move it around to properly use the file explorer. Seems like a bug. Here is an image of what I am talking about: http://i.imgur.com/0Z6xTTq.png . Clicking on the file dialogue does not bring it above the 1Password application, it is stuck hiding behind it.
Entering the master password makes me enter my password twice, which makes sense, however it is odd that there is one password strength bar for both the "new" password and "re-enter" password section. The passwords should be identical, why tell me the same thing twice? http://i.imgur.com/ySXxT8g.png
I am quite confused with how I can import Keepass data into 1Password. Some googling shows I may need to use some perl scripts someone made to import them properly. I tried exporting my keepass database to csv and importing that but there were many problems. I used a lot of specific Keepass things like folders, as well as having a duplicate record that makes reference to another password entry.
Scrolling through the list of passwords is quite choppy and not smooth at all.
The search is slower than Keepass.
For the use cases you gave of sharing passwords I'd just print them out on a sheet of paper to be honest. It actually seems easier to me than sharing passwords via a program.
And on the top of micro managing and backups. I just use dropbox which by default keeps version history so managing backups is not really a thing for me.
So in my honest opinion for now I will likely be sticking with Keepass, for the reasons above, as well as because it does not support all of the platforms I use, which in my opinion is quite a critical feature as I want my passwords on every device.
https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/64591/help-us-w...
We are targeting a release soon. This version is a complete rewrite so it'll be missing some of the things that our Mac, iOS and Android applications have, but over time we'll be continuing to improve it. Having a base we can build on was the critical goal for this upcoming release though.
So, not to brush off your concerns for the version you tried (it is the one that we are making available to users still) there will likely be an entirely different set of concerns with the new one, but mostly because it lacks other features that you may expect to be present. But I do believe it solves most of the concerns you did raise :)
Thanks a ton for taking the time to give it a shot and let me know how it was for you. I am sorry it was, what appears to be anyway, an unpleasant experience. Our Windows app has traditionally been one that has lagged behind our Mac version but we are attempting to right that now.
If we can ever answer any questions for you, or help at all in the future, please let us know!
Thanks again!
Kyle
AgileBits
