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?
Does that not apply to anything in life? How difficult is it to get code into any open-source software package or distribution really? I work in high-security environments, and I'm always wondering how you can really guarantee that any Debian, Ubuntu or Arch developer is honest and not compromised themselves, any software package installed is 100% clean, and any software library module and container image is fully checked. And that's not getting into tin foil hat assumptions about a shady government agency having access to the major app stores, Github, common distributions or email hosters.
There simply is no way anymore to check the several million lines of code even a minimal setup requires somewhere in the stack. Even an in-depth code review of a medium sized web application – with deps – has already become a gargantuan task most companies simply can't afford.
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.
I would tend to trust Apple more as they define attack vectors and mitigations in their platform security guide. Also they have a holistic approach to this from hardware through to software, not just an app tacked crudely onto whatever APIs were lying around.
I would NOT trust Microsoft though. I've had enough problems with Authenticator and so have other users in our org that I refuse to put data near it. Not concerned so much about other people getting access to it but me losing my data.
At least with keepassDX on android there is no internet access permission needed by default, but if a compromised update suddenly required it I don't know if Android would prompt about it since all apps have internet access granted without prompting :(
I also wish it was possible to block automatic updates of specific apps on the play store... So at least we could be in control over updating critical apps such as these without having to micromanage updates for all apps.
On GrapheneOS there is a prompt when installing an app that asks if you would like to grant network access. I am not sure if that pop up displays if network access is added later in an app update though.
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?
The comment was referring to Keepassium and Strongbox, which do not store credentials on their servers so it's not exactly the same. While conceivably a compromised Keepass wrapper could decrypt and send the dump of each and every file it opens, I doubt it would pass unnoticed.
pass clients can totally be backdoored. They decrypt the secret to plain text and add it to your clipboard or whatever... could easily shuttle it off somewhere else at that point.
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?
You have financial gain to show when proprietary software ends. When FOSS ends, you just have the experience. That’s fine for some, know what you’re getting into.
The license doesn't have anything to do with the financial gain. There are plenty of proprietary freeware and OSS devs who sell their apps on the playstore.
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 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.
A lot of FOSS projects are started by young people, often students. At some point, life hits, with spouses and children and real jobs demanding lots of time. Slowly people burn out, and most of the time, other people want to scratch their own itch and don't necessarily continue what already exists.
I guess password managers are relatively simple at the core but have to fulfil very different requirements so there isn't one obvious piece of software that everybody can focus on. See also bike-shedding vs building a nuclear reactor.
A better philosophy on how to herd cats would be useful in the FOSS world, though. It's a formidable force, but terribly scattered.
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.
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).
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.
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.
* 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?