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Password managers less secure than promised

https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2026/02/password-managers-less-secure-than-promised.html
38•mono-bob•1h ago

Comments

mjamil•39m ago
Has there been a similar evaluation of 1Password?
rorylawless•26m ago
1Password wrote a response to the paper: https://1password.com/blog/eth-zurich-zero-knowledge-malicio...
tempay•23m ago
It seems like 1Password is significantly more secure given the ratio of its market share to the number of articles I’ve seen like this one.
kenniskrag•23m ago
> Much like the other products we analyse, 1Password lacks authentication of public keys. This trivially enables sharing attacks similar to BW09, LP07 and DL02, something that the 1Password whitepaper...

> IMPACT. Complete compromise of vault confidentiality and integrity. The adversary can read and decrypt all vault con- tents encrypted after the attack, including passwords, credit card information, secure notes, and other sensitive data stored in the vault. Similarly, they can inject new items into the vault after the attack. REQUIREMENTS. The client fetches key material from the server, for example due to the user logging in on a new device. If executed on a non-empty vault, the attack results in the client losing access to all items already in their vault, while leaking any new items added to the vault after the attack took place. If the attack is executed at the time of vault creation, the attack is effectively undetectable by the client, since it cannot distinguish between a ciphertext it created and the ciphertext created by the server during the attack. PROPOSED MITIGATION. A straightforward mitigation is to have the client sign vault keys using the RSA private key in the keyset before encrypting them with the RSA public key. Ideally, two different key pairs would be used for...

from the paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/058.pdf

baal80spam•33m ago
That's why KeePass is still the king. Offline vault > online vault.
LoganDark•18m ago
KeePassXC can even still be online, too; example: https://logandark.net/passwords.kdbx

It's not centralized, of course; you still have to download the entire database, and then potentially upload the entire database again for any changes; but it doesn't have these vulnerabilities.

wps•9m ago
Haha this was a powermove. It is genuinely great that since it’s just a file you can host it anywhere you want. S3, WebDAV, your own site. I personally use copyparty and WireGuard for my kdbx file. I find it better than syncthing because there’s an obvious master copy (edited in place), and there’s no good way to keep syncthing running all the time on iOS, which can lead to sync conflicts.
wps•17m ago
I mostly agree! However, I plan on posting an article on HN soon discussing some of the issues with the .kdbx file format that KeePass and derivatives use within the next couple of days. KeePass has such great potential, but falls short compared to some of its (local) competitors.
arunc•15m ago
Looking forward to
delichon•8m ago
Which local competitors do you recommend? Is a text file one of them?
spacebuffer•14m ago
What to do if my house catches on fire, including my computer where the passwords are stored?
judofyr•11m ago
It’s just an encrypted file on disk. You’d depend on whatever backup solution you already have in place.
wps•7m ago
Well, the same issue exists for your BitWarden recovery keys or 2fa method. You need to have proper and redundant off site backups for anything valuable.
Someone1234•7m ago
One of the things the article touches on is encouraging these vendors to migrate their customers to more secure/modern security standards. How is this handled with KeePass with it being, by its very nature, decoupled?
jmclnx•32m ago
>cloud-based password managers

The main issue with these managers. I use an encrypted text file and Emacs, nothing on the cloud for me.

setopt•7m ago
That doesn’t fit all use cases though. For example, how to fill passwords in mobile apps on the go, or how to share a subset of your passwords with your family (including syncing password changes with them).
doubled112•30m ago
I’m not sure why anybody is surprised. Eventually, everything is proven to be less secure than promised, especially once they are online.

There are certain types of data I prefer to have complete control over. Passwords, no matter how encrypted they claim to be, are top of the list.

Sytten•29m ago
We will see when the attacks are public, a lot of the malicious server attacks we have seen in the past were kinda of overblown. Not discounting OP but it is very easy to get into clickbait territory.
mberger•26m ago
Save you the click.

The researchers demonstrated 12 attacks on Bitwarden, 7 on LastPass and 6 on Dashlane

bstsb•22m ago
a better summary from the site:

> We examine the extent to which security against a fully malicious server holds true for three leading vendors who make the Zero Knowledge Encryption claim: Bitwarden, LastPass and Dashlane [...] The attacks range in severity, from integrity violations of targeted user vaults to the complete compromise of all the vaults associated with an organisation.

bstsb•24m ago
caveat not properly addressed in the blog post: all "attacks" are assuming full takeover of web servers, which is certainly a scenario that should be protected against, but isn't really a vulnerability unless chained with something else.

almost all online services would be "vulnerable" in this way - take almost any login system. an RCE on a system hosting a login page would obviously be vulnerable to account takeover

better link here (the technical details): https://zkae.io/

kenniskrag•18m ago
Not if the advertise zero knowledge encryption. As far as I understand the password sharing / collaboration feature is often the problem.

Second: The provider can get the passwords with a simple server change.

drnick1•18m ago
> cloud-based password managers.

Enough said. This kind of stuff should be offline only. If you need to access your password database on multiple devices, set up a LAN and/or a Wireguard tunnel for remote access.

adamm255•17m ago
Hard agree, but Average Joes have no idea what any of those words mean let alone the means to do it.
lofaszvanitt•12m ago
What a sane idea to store all your secrets in one place.... for attackers to get ahold of them in one move.
wps•5m ago
Why does the federal reserve keep all that gold in one place? It’s far better to have a ridiculously secure store than it is to have to reuse passwords across a hundred sites (nobody here can remember a hundred unique high entropy passwords). I trust the cryptography far more than my brain to handle these things.
63•8m ago
The article is nearly useless for users of the software who want to know how their data may have been affected. The researchers' website is more descriptive, especilly wrt specific findings.

https://zkae.io/

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