>I downloaded the popular rockyou.txt wordlist and put my actual vault master plaintext password inside<p>I was hoping for an exploration of how quickly one might crack a lastpass vault looking at different strength passwords and different iteration counts.<p>Instead the author has simply demonstrated that if you tell the cracking tool your password it can indeed crack it...<p>I guess you can at least follow what they did with your own vault without adding your password to the word list and see if it cracks quickly or not.
> I downloaded the popular rockyou.txt wordlist and put my actual vault master plaintext password inside<p>Note that is NOT a demonstration of being able to crack an encrypted LastPass vault. The author's exercise wouldn't be feasible without prior knowledge of the master password, or choosing a master password that is present in a list of common passwords. That is consist with what we have heard from LastPass so far.
Reminder to never use pixellation to obfuscate sensitive data: <a href="https://github.com/bishopfox/unredacter">https://github.com/bishopfox/unredacter</a>
Good tutorial. This is why I prefer 1Password, as it requires the secret key to be compromised in addition to the Master Password, thus providing protection against a weak master password.<p>I've always thought it foolish to recommend solutions like LastPass and BitWarden, which don't require a secret key. It is dangerous design, prioritizing ease of onboarding over actual security.<p>The average consumer <i>needs</i> an autogenerated secret key. It provides entropy where the user will refuse to. Everyone I have helped set up a LastPass or Bitwarden account have chosen simple passwords, and are extremely resistant to the point of <i>anger</i> if you make them choose a complex one. After a few weeks, my mother changed her complex password back to a simple one behind my back - the only time she's learnt computer functionality on her own.<p>1Password's whitepaper, IMO, also shows that it's ahead of the game in general.<p>I wasn't surprised when LastPass was hacked - indeed, I've been expecting it for years - poor software quality and bad security choices were the red flags. Hopefully this forces BitWarden and LastPass to change and introduce generated secret keys in their account creation phase.
A bit disingenuous to not discuss the strength of his master password, but a good demonstration for some who still trust LastPass's very disingenuous communication.
So, if my lastpass master password is actually secure (~30 characters and contains capital, lowercase, symbols, and a long string of randomly-generated numbers that I memorized as part of it, and no part of this is reused anywhere else), do I have to worry? It does seem like a good idea to switch, but do I have to switch <i>urgently</i>?
This is an obvious demonstration, but I think still an important one. Lastpass has said this about the breach:<p>> These encrypted fields remain secured with 256-bit AES encryption and can only be decrypted with a unique encryption key derived from each user’s master password using our Zero Knowledge architecture.<p>That all sounds great but the number of bits of AES and the cool "Zero Knowledge" designation is completely irrelevant here. It entirely depends on the strength of the user supplied password. So if your password is weak you are in trouble. The other message here is that if your password was installed before 2019 it is probably going to be a lot easier for an attacker to guess.<p>That's it, that's the whole thing, but it still needs to be shown...
> I downloaded the popular rockyou.txt wordlist and put my actual vault master plaintext password inside (using a quarter of the wordlist), otherwise it would take 6 hours+ to crack.<p>I don't believe the 6 hours+ claim. (Or rather, the "+" is doing some serious lifting in that sentence.)<p>Looking at the password, it's of the correct-horse-battery-staple variety, which could be conservatively estimated at 44 bits of entropy (this is even ignoring the additional number appended to a random word) - which would take even the described "multi-gpu" setup with 2 million hashes a second just about 100 days to exhaust (or 50 days to have a 50% chance of getting it), let alone the 1000 hashes a second macbook the author was using.
- <i>" Attackers on the other hand can leverage multi-GPU device setups with optimised drivers that could easily reach speeds of 2,000,000+ H/s."</i><p>Why wasn't LastPass using memory-hard key derivation functions? I thought that's been best practice for a very long time now: we've known about GPU/ASIC hashing for decades.
I vaguely remember recovering a LastPass vault with email confirmation in ~2015, that would be a glaring security hole so maybe my memory is wrong, can anyone confirm that I’m totally wrong and that LastPass don’t have a back door into all accounts?
Does anyone have a good source on brute force and what is and isn't a good idea? I came across the below in a rather important website and am wondering if I should push harder for the to change it.<p>How secure is a randomized 5 digit pin where you get unlimited guesses but after 10 guesses the pin is reset?<p>Guessing the pin correctly gets you enough information to open a bank account.<p>Assuming a system like the above exists, would you consider it a security vulnerability?
Yes, I too cracked most of my university's passwords on a UNIX system using a dictionary and a tool in 1995.<p>There really isn't anything new here.
I hoped for something else in the end of the article. I use a local only password manager with automatically long (generally speaking, some stupid services limit password length to ridiculous short value) random generated passwords, which I don't know myself, it still seems to me to be best approach.
There is always a potentially critical vulnerability in any centralized password storage. Especially, if it requires a (relatively) simple master password to access. A many factors system like the one of Apple is IMO more secure but also easier to remember because they are all pin/passwords one needs (almost) every day.
So how was the other guy's account cracked? <a href="https://twitter.com/cryptopathic/status/1606416137771782151" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/cryptopathic/status/1606416137771782151</a><p>this should not be possible to bruteforce
Looks like the XKCD way of generating passwords is not as secure. After all, it decreases entropy by a whole lot if 30 characters can be dumbed down to 5 English words with dashes/spaces/periods between.<p>So it’s kind of like using 5 characters from a much larger alphabet (the English dictionary) instead of 30 from a 26 letter alphabet.