Lately I’ve been increasingly worried about corrupted payloads of even open source password managers. Password managers are among the world’s biggest honeypots. Maybe you trust the coders of the password manager. Maybe it’s Open Source. But do you trust all of its upstream dependencies? And all their CI build processes? And each of their developers’ security?

That’s part of why I won’t use an Electron-based password manager like BitWarden: there’s no Electron app with a minimal dependency graph. Even Electron itself could easily fall victim if someone important in the development pipeline is compromised… And besides, Electron sucks anyway.

So, one way I can mitigate against the possibility of a malicious payload being delivered on password manager update is to not put all my eggs in one basket. For example, where I can, I authenticate with a Yubikey (if only by TOTP on Yubico Authenticator). Then my password isn’t enough. But where do I store the recovery codes? Ugh: in the password manager.

I’ve been thinking on this for a while, and I haven’t really found a perfect solution that provides me a way to store secrets without also being too reliant on one party’s software. If I rely heavily on the password manager, that puts too much trust in it. If I rely more on a hardware token, that’s too risky in case of loss of theft.

What’s a security-aware nerd to do?

  • theonlykl@partizle.com
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    1 year ago

    Current have two Yubikeys for personal use. One is a backup and remains in a fireproof safe, while the other is on my most / all of the time via my keyring. Agree the individual side is a bit more complex.

    For me I took the approach of not relying that much on cloud services and rolling a lot of it myself. My data then gets backed up to a backup repository via borgbase in the EU. Usually try to follow the 3,2,1 rule for backups. Three copies of your data on two different medias with one copy offsite (ok the two different medias thing i cheat a bit and have a couple extra disks).

    The enterprise side we’ve talked about implementing Yubikeys in the org, but havent gotten all the buy in on that yet.

        • bouncing@partizle.comOPM
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          1 year ago

          That’s the weak spot. It seems unlikely, but if there were a natural disaster or house fire, you’d lose access to your vault and your data.

          In my case, that would be irreplaceable family photos, which is why I’m thinking about this more. I have an off-site backup for my data, but I’d need to be able to decrypt it.