The headline here says "stores in memory", which sounds pretty much identical to me. Can you elaborate on what you consider the difference between "loading" and "storing" into memory?

Security isn't black and white. If i leave a post-it note of my logins on my monitor, that's definitely less safe than in a unlocked drawer, and so on.

This is 100% that case. Basically every form (like this very one I'm typing in) is held in userspace memory un-encrypted. And yet lawyers and doctors and CIA operatives all use forms to type very sensitive stuff in.

It would be stupid, wasteful, and overly-complex to encrypt forms just in case some malicious process somehow got ring0 access. In that case, a keylogger is likely more useful anyway. And you're fucked even if you are encrypting stuff (as keys are likely also somewhere in memory[1] and they need to be—gasp—unencrypted). There's no free lunch.

Stupid Twitter thread meant to rage-bait for engagement.

[1] They could also be on disk or on some peripheral, but still fully readable by a motivated-enough hacker.

Reading arbitrary process memory can be done as a standard user. No admin needed. Any Win32 program can do it. You just can't access the memory from processes that are admin-level.

There's little hope of protecting against a snooper seeing the passwords you actually use, since they have to exist in plaintext at some point. But there's no reason to expose the entire password database when no passwords are even being used.

They want obscurity and think it's security. Everything needed to get the passwords must be present in memory but they don't want to be able to actually see the passwords directly.

Password managers often go through quite some hassle to keep passwords 'safe' in memory. However, I often do not get the attack model of many of those tools. Tools like keepass e.g. go through quite to register a browser plugin. But then anyone with normal user rights can extract that key from the browser and do everything with it. Also this whole 'trust this browser' stuff of web apps seems strange if one e.g. can read the cookie store easily...

Out of curiosity, why KeePass versus Bitwarden? I've been using Bitwarden for years, but if there's a specific reason I should be using KeePass instead, I'm open to changing.

@taviso had claimed the exact opposite: https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/passmgrs.html

EDIT: Yes, he claimed that for online password managers, not keepass. I thought the argument was about password managers in general.

If it is a process, running in the same user context, with the ability to read/dump arbitrary memory -- As the KeePass database is decrypted it would "store all passwords in memory in plain text" too.

The fix isn't Edge Vs. Chrome. Vs KeePass Vs. Bitwarden, it is "How do I have my passwords exist in a different execution context than [evil process able to read all memory]?"

Android and iOS have an "answer" to this problem. Desktop OSs having all processes running side by side in the user's execution context, do not. It is only as secure as the least secure process running.

This is generally true of every application that handles sensitive data. Unless you explicitly clear that memory, it's likely to hang around forever.

For example, here is a 2019 writeup from KeePassXC with similar notes: https://keepassxc.org/blog/2019-02-21-memory-security/ - even though they explicitly clear sensitive data, there is still a window of opportunity.

During my time working on confidential computing, we had a variety of demos showing similar attacks against lots of different datastores, scripts, etc. That's just how computers work and your options are very limited if this is part of your threat model (imo just confidential computing and, if you can handle the performance hit, fully-homomorphic encryption).

Password hashes are one-directional lossy storage. If a password manager "hashed your password" it would be essentially deleting your password and replacing it with something else which cannot be used to log into anything. The password MUST be recoverable to plain-text to replay it to a website.

But you're correct that Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Lastpass, BitWarden, even Keepass have the same issue. It is an Operating System limitation, not a password manager problem.

Linux stores plenty of passwords in clear text in /etc and $HOME and this is considered acceptable by most users. These same people also believe the TPM is a spy chip.