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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday February 21 2019, @09:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the *********** dept.

A security consulting firm released a report on the safety of password managers. A non-geek, summarized version is also available at the Washington Post. (Summarized graphic of results.)

The password managers included in the study were 1Password 4, 1Password 7, Dashlane, KeePass, LastPass. Unfortunately, the testing was limited to Win10 even if the password managers were available on other platforms. They all had some flaws, but as reported, you should still use one. They were all tested for encryption method on the database, accessibility of the master password and keys in memory while unlocked, and the master password and keys in memory while locked.

All were evaluated to have adequate encryption on the file. 1Password 4 (which actually had better memory security than 1Password 7,) was best at keeping individual passwords safe in memory; while KeePass was best at keeping the Master Password safe in the memory tests (although Dashlane did the same while it while in a locked state.)


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday February 21 2019, @04:53PM (1 child)

    by ElizabethGreene (6748) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 21 2019, @04:53PM (#804572) Journal

    The former won't work because Windows zeroes pages after use [microsoft.com].

    If you read TFTA, they call that out specifically and the thing you say won't work absolutely did. They were able to retrieve cleartext credentials and the master key from a crash dump or a locked running process that the Windows memory manager hadn't cleaned up yet.

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  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday February 21 2019, @11:04PM

    by driverless (4770) on Thursday February 21 2019, @11:04PM (#804766)

    Now we're just going round in circles, and you haven't read what I originally wrote. To bypass the Windows protection mechanisms, you need to either be Administrator or be running as the user with equivalent admin-level privs (SE_BACKUP, SE_DEBUG, etc). If the attacker is already Administrator on the machine or has similar privs that allow them to do whatever they want to the user then the presence or absence of a password manager is irrelevant, the user is screwed.