- Millions of people use password managers. They make accessing online services and bank accounts easy and simplify credit card payments.
- Many providers promise absolute security – the data is said to be so encrypted that even the providers themselves cannot access it.
- However, researchers from ETH Zurich have shown that it is possible for hackers to view and even change passwords.
For people interested there were 3 cloud based password managers tested and this is what they found
Unfortunately they don’t explain what the attacks were in the article. Gonna need to find the paper to know.
Is there a reason why these attacks were on cloud based pw managers?
That’s where most of the passwords are
The method, they use, requires a client-server architecture. Hence, they cannot attack a local keepass file even if you sync it to some cloud.
From what I scanned, there was no reason given on why they only attacked cloud based providers.
My guess is that these are paid ones and thus have a ‘market share’, easier to attack etc.
If you attack a ‘keepass’ password the attack vector is more crypto / memory based as far as my limited knowledge goes and not some funky inbetween attack.
Also, if you attack a cloud base provides, you will most likely have multiple victims per breach / exploit, whilst offline are targeted and thus not so interesting in most cases unless we’re talking about a person of interest
they ran the test on those pw managers because they were open source. that allowed the testers to implement a “dummy” provider on their own “compromised server.” so the results of failing the tests are based on the hypothetical situation of “what if bitwarden (or whoever) had an entire server taken over by hackers”. while the chances of that happening are greater than zero, it would take a lot for someone to completely hijack a server like that
edit to add-- these tests are one of the reasons these pw managers choose to be open source: to allow 3rd party tests like this to find vulnerabilities, so they can be fixed
nothing is 100% guaranteed safe, but if you don’t want to remember or write down dozens or hundreds of unique strong passwords, i still would recommend a pw manager
Oh okay so they probably delivered malicious code to the user entering their passwords… Well even an offline pw manager can be compromised in the code.
Yes but unfortunately nothing specific about the strength of any particular option.