I worry a lot about password managers on mobile. Such as:
* if an app has a single developer (keepassium? strongbox?), how much money would it take them to add a back door? 1M USD? 10M USD? Let’s say they are exceptionally honest, and won’t take money. How about threats to their lives or families?
* if an app has a small number of engineers with commit access (bitwarden? 1paasword?) could any one of them be compromised by money or threats?
* Would password managers from Google/apple/microsoft fare better because they already face these risks and have controls? Or maybe not?
It is just slightly more difficult and longer to target it in a large company because you usually have to actually be hired by that company and do not necessarily have the choice of the team/products you will be working on.
But adding backdoors and vuln, yes totally possible on random products that person would be affected to. There is review fatigue the same way there is fatigue in a lot of processes.
> It is just slightly more difficult and longer to target it in a large company because you usually have to actually be hired by that company and do not necessarily have the choice of the team/products you will be working on.
There are lots of examples at almost all the fortune 500. Because they do not sneak in as just some random employee.
Cisco is very well known for backdoors in their equipment.
Adding a backdoor is not the difficult part, leaving no trace is.
People don't know who you are on github, but it's easy for top name companies to track who created the backdoor in great detail. Actually the power of tracing real person is one of the the best defenses.
What's your threat model here? Some kind of mass hacking attempt? It would be easier to attack the service providers, rather than steal legitimate logins.
A targeted attack on a specific person? It would be easier to, as the famous XKCD suggests, drug and/or hit them with a wrench until they voluntarily hand over whatever information you want.
It's difficult to conceive of a situation where hacking password managers is the path of least resistance.
The idea is to sell the dump, this is the case for nearly every dataset you see reported on Have I Been Pwned. I'm not really sure how there is even any question about oh why would anyone do this?
In the past two days, the official Syncthing Android client has been discontinued, making the use of KeePass harder. Bitwarden has been trying to move away from a fully FOSS system. And now this?
I've been using keepass for quite a number of years now. I have my database and a security key. I sync my database with dropbox (because I am too lazy to self-host something like nextcloud) between devices and just manually copy my key on everry device. My key was never synced through the internet.
I hope that's secure enough and works fine for me. I guess syncthing is just smaller and obviously doesn't need a third party?
Shameless plug: A few months ago I wrote a blog post [1] about integrating PasswordStore + GnuPG + TouchID on MacBook, and used that to automate my work VPN (Cisco AnyConnect) auto-connection [2], hence avoiding the need to interact with a very bad UI that is AnyConnect.
This app with OpenKeychain and a smartcard was tricky to setup and a bit clunky to use, but it was great having offline access to my `pass` repo on mobile. I also have remote access via SSH setup, but the UX is not as good.
Hopefully an alternative appears, as I don't want to switch to Bitwarden. It's too business focused, and I honestly don't trust it.
Looking into it now, there's OkcAgent[1], which integrates OpenKeychain with Termux, but it hasn't been updated in a few years, and seems to have major issues.
This seems to happen more and more often, or at least it feels that way to me. FLOSS projects that aren't highly critical but very useful are maintained by only one person which loses interest, burns out or simply has other priorities. Sometimes they don't even make an announcement like here and just ghost the project. Very sad, even though understandable.
It happens also to proprietary apps maintained by individual developpers / small teams. At least in this case an open source project is easier to fork even if original dev becomes unresponsive/unreachable.
Consumer softwares in the current environment can probably only live a few years at most (if you count security in, probably months) without maintenance. The author's decision to pull it from play store is very sensible and should be appreciated.
Password Store sounds like a cool Unixy idea, but it's quite janky in my experience, especially if non-desktop-Unix systems are involved. The Android app was fine; it integrated with a GPG app that was less fine.
The point of `pass` is to offload the security aspect to gpg, so unless something goes wrong with that, I don't believe continued use, even if unmaintained, is very insecure.
The Android app will by necessity receive the decrypted passwords from GPG to display and copy them to the clipboard. It could do whatever else it wants with them.
In actually SSH into my desktop PC and use pass there to access my secrets.
Luckily, I only need to do this occasionally, so the inconvenience is bearable. Still waiting on the day where I randomly get logged out of an important app while not having internet access, or the power going out in my apartment right after I leave for two weeks (happened once, luckily didn't need my passwords then).
I worry a lot about password managers on mobile. Such as:
* if an app has a single developer (keepassium? strongbox?), how much money would it take them to add a back door? 1M USD? 10M USD? Let’s say they are exceptionally honest, and won’t take money. How about threats to their lives or families?
* if an app has a small number of engineers with commit access (bitwarden? 1paasword?) could any one of them be compromised by money or threats?
* Would password managers from Google/apple/microsoft fare better because they already face these risks and have controls? Or maybe not?
> Or maybe not?
This.
It is just slightly more difficult and longer to target it in a large company because you usually have to actually be hired by that company and do not necessarily have the choice of the team/products you will be working on.
But adding backdoors and vuln, yes totally possible on random products that person would be affected to. There is review fatigue the same way there is fatigue in a lot of processes.
> It is just slightly more difficult and longer to target it in a large company because you usually have to actually be hired by that company and do not necessarily have the choice of the team/products you will be working on.
There are lots of examples at almost all the fortune 500. Because they do not sneak in as just some random employee.
Cisco is very well known for backdoors in their equipment.
Adding a backdoor is not the difficult part, leaving no trace is. People don't know who you are on github, but it's easy for top name companies to track who created the backdoor in great detail. Actually the power of tracing real person is one of the the best defenses.
> add a back door?
What's your threat model here? Some kind of mass hacking attempt? It would be easier to attack the service providers, rather than steal legitimate logins.
A targeted attack on a specific person? It would be easier to, as the famous XKCD suggests, drug and/or hit them with a wrench until they voluntarily hand over whatever information you want.
It's difficult to conceive of a situation where hacking password managers is the path of least resistance.
Isn’t it the same threat model as Lastpass breach? Login credentials seem to be worth money, and crypto keys even more.
The idea is to sell the dump, this is the case for nearly every dataset you see reported on Have I Been Pwned. I'm not really sure how there is even any question about oh why would anyone do this?
In the past two days, the official Syncthing Android client has been discontinued, making the use of KeePass harder. Bitwarden has been trying to move away from a fully FOSS system. And now this?
A fork of syncthing had been in development and released for a while though, so use of keepass isn't really getting harder unless this developer also pull the plug. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncth...
I've been using keepass for quite a number of years now. I have my database and a security key. I sync my database with dropbox (because I am too lazy to self-host something like nextcloud) between devices and just manually copy my key on everry device. My key was never synced through the internet.
I hope that's secure enough and works fine for me. I guess syncthing is just smaller and obviously doesn't need a third party?
fwiw i've recently moved to sharing my kpdb using taildrive. The KeePass Android app can open databases from WebDAV
For iOS, Keepassium can use WebDAV as well.
Turns out living the FOSS dream is kind of hard.
Tbh the same struggle affect proprietary software.
It is more about individual developpers/small teams versus large companies.
it's not FOSS or not. Basically, who owns it or who pays for it. People have interest and people need earnings to live. Business is business.
> Bitwarden has been trying to move away from a fully FOSS system
Details?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41893994
The reason is the idea of a free operating system and software has been shattered and is now a guest in big corporations and Github.
It still kind of work but it is starting to crack in a few places.
[dead]
Shameless plug: A few months ago I wrote a blog post [1] about integrating PasswordStore + GnuPG + TouchID on MacBook, and used that to automate my work VPN (Cisco AnyConnect) auto-connection [2], hence avoiding the need to interact with a very bad UI that is AnyConnect.
Hopefully others find it useful.
[1]: https://gurjeet.singh.im/blog/passwordstore+gnupg+touchid
[2]: https://gurjeet.singh.im/blog/cisco-anyconnect-vpn-automatio...
Ugh, awful news. :(
This app with OpenKeychain and a smartcard was tricky to setup and a bit clunky to use, but it was great having offline access to my `pass` repo on mobile. I also have remote access via SSH setup, but the UX is not as good.
Hopefully an alternative appears, as I don't want to switch to Bitwarden. It's too business focused, and I honestly don't trust it.
Looking into it now, there's OkcAgent[1], which integrates OpenKeychain with Termux, but it hasn't been updated in a few years, and seems to have major issues.
[1]: https://github.com/DDoSolitary/OkcAgent
“pass” in this context refers to a GPG-encrypted file based password manager: https://www.passwordstore.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pass_(software) https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pass.
“pass” itself can be used in many contexts, but is primarily a desktop command-line tool. “Password Store” is the Android client for it.
This seems to happen more and more often, or at least it feels that way to me. FLOSS projects that aren't highly critical but very useful are maintained by only one person which loses interest, burns out or simply has other priorities. Sometimes they don't even make an announcement like here and just ghost the project. Very sad, even though understandable.
It happens also to proprietary apps maintained by individual developpers / small teams. At least in this case an open source project is easier to fork even if original dev becomes unresponsive/unreachable.
This is such a great application.
I feel like it's complete already and would be happy if it just continued to exist without much or any maintenance.
Consumer softwares in the current environment can probably only live a few years at most (if you count security in, probably months) without maintenance. The author's decision to pull it from play store is very sensible and should be appreciated.
There is always need for maintenance on Android.
That maintenance can be relatively minimal if you aren't distributing the app through the playstore. Like once per n android release.
Dang, this is rough. Pass is imo still the best password manager if you set it up right.
Hopefully someone picks this up.
Password Store sounds like a cool Unixy idea, but it's quite janky in my experience, especially if non-desktop-Unix systems are involved. The Android app was fine; it integrated with a GPG app that was less fine.
This is actually a better outcome than finding out one day the app have a serious security problem.
While i like `pass` and that Android app looked really good, this is just not serious.
Because the fact that most people will end up trusting a random app as their password manager because it has 2k star on Github is crazy.
If you want to use `pass` on Android you should tinker something with termux .
The point of `pass` is to offload the security aspect to gpg, so unless something goes wrong with that, I don't believe continued use, even if unmaintained, is very insecure.
The Android app will by necessity receive the decrypted passwords from GPG to display and copy them to the clipboard. It could do whatever else it wants with them.
I think termux has some limitations here (due to missing libraries), namely gpg decryption via hardware keys.
In actually SSH into my desktop PC and use pass there to access my secrets.
Luckily, I only need to do this occasionally, so the inconvenience is bearable. Still waiting on the day where I randomly get logged out of an important app while not having internet access, or the power going out in my apartment right after I leave for two weeks (happened once, luckily didn't need my passwords then).
That's saddening. APS used to be my daily driver once, and later I moved to Bitwarden.