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The War on Passwords Is One Step Closer to Being Over
(www.wired.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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Literally just use a password manager and 2/MFA. It’s not a problem. We have a solution.
Actually, it is still a problem, because passwords are a shared secret between you and the server, which means the server has that secret in some sort of form. With passkeys, the server never has the secret.
The shared secret with my Vaultwarden server? Add mfa and someone needs to explain to me how passkeys do anything more than saving one single solitary click.
When a website gets hacked they only find public keys, which are useless without the private keys.
Private keys stored on a password manager are still more secure, as those services are (hopefully!) designed with security in mind from the beginning.
If a website with old-school passwords gets hacked, the hacker only gets salted hashes of passwords - this does not seem to be much worse?
(Websites that store plaintext passwords surely won't implement passkeys either...)
Pass keys are for websites such as Google, Facebook, TikTok, etc. And then they go into what is currently your password manager or if you don't have one, it goes into your device. You still have to prove to that password manager that you are, who you say you are, either by a master password of some sort or biometrics.
Best password manager is offline password manager.
KeepassXC makes a file with the passwords that is encrypted, sharing this file with a server is more secure than letting the server manage your passwords
This is not at all relevant to the comment you're responding to. Your choice of password manager doesn't change that whatever system you're authenticating against still needs to have at least a hash of your password. That's what passkeys are improving on here
I agree, and that's my method as well. Although I do not ever share the file with a server either. I only transfer it from device to device with flash drives or syncthing.
How do you handle merging between devices? Do you manually transfer/sync every time you add a new password?
Not trying to sell you on putting it in cloud storage or anything, but one really nice benefit to doing so is automatic merging through clients like Keepass2Android. If I add a new site to my phone and it doesn't already have the latest copy of my vault, it'll fetch and merge that first.
Technically yes I don't have to use a desktop or laptop very often and do most of my computing from my mobile phone running lineage OS obviously and so what I do is if I add a password once every quarter at least I back it up to a flash drive so that if nothing else I will only lose a few months worth of data. I also don't go signing up for accounts and services all that often since I am particularly interested in keeping my privacy. So very few modifications occur with my passwords in three months. If I absolutely must get a new password onto my laptop immediately, then I will go ahead and plug in my flash drive and manually synchronize whenever that is required as well.
I do that too, I have my own server in my basement for storage
Look at us. A bunch of people who don't trust society. LOL.
You can share passwords without the server seeing them. Many managers don't but there's nothing infeasible there. You just have a password to unlock the manager. Done.
What I'm getting at is that a web server has a password, in some form. And so if that site gets breached, your password itself may not get leaked, but the hash will. And if the hash is a common hash, then it can be easily cracked or guessed.
Ultimately I'm pro passkey but when it comes to password managers: if the hash of your vault is easy to crack you've fucked up big time. There shouldn't be any way to crack that key with current tech before the sun explodes because you should be using a high entropy passphrase.
Oh, you absolutely should. And if you are not, that is nobody's fault except your own.
Not anything sufficiently modern. Salted passwords should be exceedingly difficult to reverse.
Never forget that technologically speaking you're nothing like the average user. Only 1 in 3 users use password managers. Most people just remember 1 password and use it everywhere (or some other similarly weak setup).
Not remembering passwords is a huge boon for most users, and passkeys are a very simple and secure way of handling it.
I work for multiple organizations. The majority of which have a Google sheet with their passwords in that are
Those that aren't are
Exactly.
At one point the organization I work for had a password that was literally
Password-022!, guess what it was the following month?I had to start hashing passwords and sending it to the haveibeenpwned API.
I also fight with my users over data normalization because any time I add some rule (like don’t put “SO#” as part of the value of the “SO#” field), they’re too stupid to realize the point and find some other “hack” around it.