The only good passwords are those you don’t know yourself because they are randomly generated and all stored in your password manager of choice.
Until some locked down tv/console type device asks me for a password.
Then you look up the random string of 36 characters once, think “why did I make this one 36 characters” as you painstakingly type it in with a TV remote, then immediately forget it as soon as you’re logged in.
Then repeat this process every few months the device decides it needs to ask the password of you again. Not playing this game
Take the TV throw it out of the window.
Buy a minipc and plugin a cheap Monitor via hdmi.
Setup kodi or similar on your minipc and you won’t even have ads anymore because you will of course install pihole too.
But I need a password to open my windows
Ugh, I hate typing with the remote so fucking much! It’s worse than having a mild case of covid-19.
I have a keyboard connected to my TV and some apps still refuse to accept its input, forcing me to use the stupid remote keyboard
If you have a tv remote app, you can paste the password in (source: experience)
Not write it down on a post it and recycle it with the rest of paper products only for the gmen to go through your thrash and find it?
There must be a better way (bluetooth keyboard maybe?)
Device recognition instead of passwords, using your phone. A number of apps already do this and logging in is painless even with a shitty old remote.
Diceware words.
I use an off-line libre password manager for several bad designed goverment stuff that only accept numbers as passwords or don’t allow to paste it.
It’s not that hard and I easily get used to it. I read it, type it and forget it again.
Oh god I hate those sites that doesn’t allow paste option.
There’s a firefox extension “Don’t fuck with paste”, maybe you should check it out!
I like KeepassXC’s auto-type option; No pasting needed when it can just pretend it’s a keyboard and type for you!
Yeah this is just crazy good. I’m even using it for non-password use cases like copying scripts to virtual machines I can’t copypaste to.
Some password managers support generating random passphrases like “correctbatteryhorsestaple.” They’re still a pain to punch in on a remote, but much easier to keep track of where you are in the password and avoid transcription errors.
I hate this shit so much, even when I can do semi okay because I use a Shield TV the logins are still a pain in the ass.
deleted by creator
Well that’s on you then.
1. Keep encrypted backups of your password database, so that you can migrate to something else if you need to.
B. Make sure to have your password database synced to your phone or accessible in some other way when you’re out and about.
III. If purely offline and local password manager with no syncing, have a way for a trusted person to be able to access it, if you need them to.
• Lastly, attempt to not suffer memory loss and forget your main credentials to the password manager.
depends on the password manager…
also, the length of the password is WAY more important than it being randomly generated as long as it’s not in a password dictionary somewhere. I use 20+ character passphrases that i can easily remember everywhere for instance
My strategy is to have a persistent short passphrase that’s within every password I use, and pair it with a silly bastardization of the service I have an account for. So, for example, if my passphrase were hunter2 (lol) and I had an account on Netflix, my password for Netflix might be something like hunter2NutFlex. Because of this, I can manage my own passwords in basic text as “code NutFlex” because the “code” portion is encrypted in my own fucking brain. If Netflix gets hacked, somebody has a password that only works with Netflix, and they’d need my text file as a Rosetta Stone to acquire my other passwords. Not impossible, but who the fuck am I and why would anybody dig that deep to do that to me?
I’m no IT expert, so somebody tell me if this is a stupid and overly vulnerable strategy. I thought I was pretty brilliant for coming up with this and rolling it out several years ago.
i am an IT person (wouldnt say expert) and i do this. password cracking time is based on the number of characters, not the type of char so you can do “abcdefghijk” and it will be more secure than “_a;” (both are still weak but my point stands)
all of this can be broken if you just use common passwords or plain english words since those are broken with dictionary attacks
It’s not the worst strategy (and is actually referred to as ‘peppering’ your password)… but if your primary use-case is websites and mobile apps, using a password manager like Bitwarden and randomly generated strong passwords is still a better strategy (and probably faster too, since you don’t need to type it out manually anymore, and/or remember which flex you used when creating your ‘peppered’ password).
This is a good approach if you have to login to services that aren’t via a web browser though - e.g. Remote desktops etc.
I’d say the approach is potentially vulnerable, but the tech isn’t quite there. The modern approach to password cracking is to take a huge dictionary, and run permutations on itб like change a’s to @'s, capitalizing first letterы or adding numbers in the end. Any cracker worth their salt will have something like “add _netflix” as a permutation, too. I don’t think that anyone would have “NutFlex” in there, yet, but it’s possible if one of them stumbles on your leaked password from somewhere else.
As for “basic text”, do you mean like .txt’s? And do you store the entire password there? We do have viruses that scan for crypto wallets and it’s seed phrases already. It’s not too far fetched to imagine one that would cross-match any txt’s contents in the system with browser’s saved logins.
The most glaring issue I see is that the bastardization is effectively part of your password. With 1000+ passwords it’s going to be easy to forget (was it nutflix, sneedtflex, nyetflex or something?) and it’s going to be hard to find it if you don’t manage the codes properly. I recently had to scan over every single of my password manager entries (forgot a 100% random login, password and domain), let me tell ya, It wasn’t fun.
You could possibly switch to a “client-side salting” approach, having a strong consistent password in you head, and storing a short but truly random suffixes for each service. e.g. text file named “Netflix” containing something like “T3M#f” and the final password would be something like “hunter2T3M#f”. At least that’s what responsible sites do to protect people who have simple/matching passwords. You could even store those suffixes somewhere semi-openly, like in a messenger as messages to yourself. But at that point, it’s probably easier to go with a password manager. Though that’s an option if you don’t trust those.
You could possibly switch to a “client-side salting” approach, having a strong consistent password in you head, and storing a short but truly random suffixes for each service. e.g. text file named “Netflix” containing something like “T3M#f” and the final password would be something like “hunter2T3M#f”.
I guess I’m not understanding how this is functionally different from what I already am doing. Why would your 12 character solution be more secure than my 14 character example? Is it just because NutFlex is two actual words, so a dictionary attack could crack that more easily? Or is it because it’s kinda close to the domain the account is associated with? Would I be significantly better off replacing those bastardizations with other random words?
Edit: and also, they’re saved as notes in my phone, and no I don’t type the whole password in. That would defeat the purpose of having a persistent master phrase as part of the password.
they’re saved as notes in my phone, and no I don’t type the whole password in
Then I must have misunderstood your approach. Is it like a single note with all the keywords only, then?
I guess I’m not understanding how this is functionally different from what I already am doing. Why would your 12 character solution be more secure than my 14 character example
Yeah, it’s because it’s close to the associated domain. The way I see it, this bastardization adds little entropy (there’s only so much possible variations) but also rather easy to forget. And a huge problem, in my opinion, is it’s using your mental capacity for per-site suffixes rather than master password.
A possible attack I see, is if I set up a site, say a forum called MyLittlePony.su with no password protection whatsoever, and lure you to register on it. If I scroll through the accounts and notice your password to be “hunter2MyLittlePenis”, I might go to paypal and give it a shot with “hunter2PenisPal”. Or, somebody whom I sold the database to, might. It’s extremely rare that anyone would even look at your password specifically unless you are some kind of celebrity, but it’s still a possibility. Maybe some future AI tech would be able to crack your strategy (I’ve tried, ChatGPT told me to fuck right off and FreedomGPT is not good enough yet)
Though you’ve said you also keep notes, which deals with the easy-to-forget part of the problem, so my first thought was to get rid of bastardization and add fuck-all amount of entropy by using a truly random suffix. That’d deal with the above problem. But, that’d mean that it’s your master password that is the suffix now, and you wouldn’t be able to access sites without the notes at all, hence it’d be easier to go with password manager at that point.
Backup recovery phrase is a good way 2
Except you DO know the password to your password manager, which makes it about as secure as just writing them down and keeping them in the house.
Counterpoint: Password Manager = One point of failure
Multiple Strong Passwords that have to be changed every 3 months even to sign on to your cornerstore rewards program without a password manager? Guess you’re never accessing any account older than 3 months because you’ve forgotten th3 b1lli0n$ oF s+r0ng p4s5w0rds Y0u h4Ve cr3atEd!
Actually you are the single point of failure
I mean yeah, the security benefit from being un-notable isnt negligible
That’s…not a counterpoint.
You can have strong authentication on your central password manager, and have an encrypted container protecting it.
There is no logical argument against password vaults as a concept. There are bad implementations of specific password vaults, but a password vault is the answer for the highest possible password based security available in 2023.
And figuring out which password managers to use is not a task which a lot of people know where to start, and it is STILL a single point of failure
I have no idea about how to protect a password manager with an encrypted container.
And to be honest with you, it’s not something I’m likely to do even if you do attempt to explain the 60 minute long $10 18-step process to me. Or however long it takes and whatever it costs.
And really, for all my ignorant ass knows you could’ve just as well been encouraging me to get malware and I’d be none the wiser.
What makes it completely unusable for me is that I don’t have a single work computer I use. I have to bounce around computers at work, my personal phone, computer, work iPad, etc.
Okay and now let’s get into threat modelling and risk management.
What is the purpose of a password manager? What are the possible threats against them, and what are those against singular passwords for services? What is the risk of each of those?
Guys, before you argue with me, password security is something that EVERYONE in the 1st world has to deal with, not just tech nerds. If you need to grow up around computers or take a class for it to be a good form of security, its a shit form of security for the general public
But you don’t?
Password managers really are not hard to use. Also there’s stuff like the password manager built into iOS, for example, which you don’t even have to think about.
My comment about threat modelling was that you do not seem to understand the purpose of password managers. A way bigger problem for the average person online is password reuse, not targeted attacks against password vaults. That is the problem they solve.
The weird trope I’ve seen now is “don’t use the password manager in your browser”. For the life of me, I can’t think why some think a browser plugin to a commercial password manager is safer than the built in version.
They probably think it’s safer somehow. But I don’t really get how.
Most built-in password managers allow for you to setup a master password of sorts if you try to sync everything to a new device, and most also require you to use your computer’s native verification to view a single password in plaintext or export all of them as plaintext. (For browsers on Windows, they use Windows Hello; for browsers on Android, they use the fingerprint scanner or the lock screen pin.)
Imagine a site telling you “Sorry, you can’t use
asdf123as your password: you’ve already used it on that other site”.That’s not as far fetched as it sounds. Any website worth its salt will store your password as a hash, so if they started sharing the hashes with each other they could prevent you from reusing passwords without changing much security-wise
Any website worth its salt will salt the hash as well…
It would be better if you had a local tool telling you that - one that you control and only exists on your personal devices, kind of like secure messaging platforms such as Signal.
Another great later would be for all compromised passwords found in breaches to never be usable anywhere ever again, thus helping to thwart the most common form of breach we see today: credential stuffing.
Sorry you can’t use *******
That wouldn’t help that much
This was supposed to be a joke; of course it wouldn’t.
It’s a pretty old meme, hunter11, but it checks out.
Just use a password manager, then you get the benefits of having a single password to remember without the security-related downsides.
I never got over the fact that I somehow need to trust to an absurdly high degree a proprietary software to store ALL my passwords. Is this really a good idea?
You can use KeePass, but you’ll have to figure out a way to have your password vault available on other devices (can do it by using any cloud shares, i.e. GDrive). This way you’ll be in charge of almost every aspect of your passwords. But you’ll have to take care of backups and keep everything in sync.
KeePass
I’m sorry but no. I’m physically incapable of not moving the capital letter one space and I’m not entrusting my passwords to what I’ve irrationally decided IS named KeepAss. I just can’t.
I like Vaultwarden. Open source rust server compatible with bitwarden.
Just imagine keeping your passwords in your ass and you should be fine.
I’ve had that dream before, didn’t help…
Or simply can use, Bitwarden or Protonpass
Syncthing works very well for cross platform syncing
I have this issue with bit warden
It seems bitwarden is a bit more user friendly and also quite good in terms of security and privacy related issues (FOSS as well!) . Thanks for the help!
There are libre off-line password managers. Variants of Keepass for example.
Indeed it’s a bad idea to store passwords in a propietary system. Specially a cloud based one being hacked time to time, like 1password.
I’m unaware of 1password ever getting hacked.
Even if they did, there’s some really smart technology at play here. I think your paranoia here is unjustified. I felt the same way until I read about their technology. At that point I felt comfortable using their service.
I mean, just three days ago we had this incident, which is probably what they are referring to: https://blog.1password.com/okta-incident/
Anyway, iirc, 1password is architected in a way where a breach won’t actually disclose the passwords of their users, but I’m too tired to do the requisite double-checking to verify it
I’m unaware of 1password ever getting hacked. https://cybersecuritynews.com/1password-hacked/?amp
I think your paranoia here is unjustified
You are right in a way. I always assume company sysadmins have access to company data, even if they say the opposite, and I always assume there are undisclosed data leaks. Which may seem a little paranoid.
It’s like closing your car’s door when leaving it alone: Is it paranoid to assume that always there are someone willing to steal stuff?
It’s the choice between trusting one company (or if you self host, trusting yourself) to have their security all in order and properly encrypt the password vault. Using one password for every site you use means that you have to trust each of those sites equally, because if one leaks your password because they have atrocious password policies (eg. storing it in plain text), it’s leaked everywhere and you need to remember every place you used it before.
Good password managers allow audits, and do at times still get hacked naturally (which isn’t 100% preventable). Yet neither of these should result in passwords being leaked. Why? Because they properly secure your master password so it can’t be reverse engineered to plain text, and without the master password your encrypted password vault is just a bunch of random bytes. And even in the extreme situation it did, you know to switch to a better password manager, and you have a nice big list of all the places where you need to change your password rather than trying to remember them all.
Human memory is fallible and we want the least amount of effort, because of that we usually make bad passwords. Your average site does not have their password security up to date (There’s almost a 0% chance not one of your passwords can be found here). If you data is encrypted accordingly, it doesn’t matter if it gets leaked in any way or stolen by some rogue employee, so long as they do not have your master password. So yes, I’d say that’s a good idea.
I have been wondering as of lately, I’m an old Bitwarden user and I use their generated passwords which are just a random mess for my eye, anyway when a leak occurs I usually tend to type my known passwords to match it with the leak lists, but now all this being auto generated and I be totally clueless of which is which, how would I ever notice if one of those more secure passwords are leaked?
Does Bitwarden let you know of leaked passwords as Chrome and I think Firefox does? Because I don’t recall having this info in hand.
You can go into your vault and choose a password to see if it’s been exposed on the web. It’s a little check mark by the password.
Everyone talks about password managers these days, but isn’t that telling the hackers exactly where to go to get all your passwords? Seems like a much higher chance of catastrophic failure to me if you have a single point of entry.
I just use a password manager for my password managers password manager. 2fa on all of em. Takes me forever to login
I dunno, doesn’t sound like enough layers to me. We can go deeper
2FA on the 2FA
You might even say … 4FA
FA^4
The main argument to use password managers to prevent password leaks to all of your services (that you use with the same login/email). You can’t trust any service to store your password securely, therefore you should use different ones everywhere.
Using a password manager gives you the convenience of using one, strong password that’s being used very securely, and mitigating risk of password leaks spreading further.
If you abstract it that way, it by no means eliminates the risk of someone breaking into your database, but makes it harder and from a single entry point, instead of any service that uses your password.
Plus many of those password managers give you an option to use YubiKey for additional security.
Oh and also you won’t ever need to press “forgot password” ever again due to the arbitrary requirements that your password doesn’t pass, so you modify it slightly so it would.
Yes that’s definitely a concern to keep in mind.
The problem is that if someone doesn’t use a password manager they’re morenlikely to reuse weak ones.
Using a password manager is a better path, as long as there is awareness on how to keep it secured.
I use the same password for every site, but I put the name of the site at the end of the password.
For example:
NotmypassB3ta.
NotmypassGoogle.
NotnypassLemmy. Etc.
I figure it might stop the most lazy of attacks.deleted by creator
I had something similar but ran into issues with sites requiring specific symbols, disallowing certain symbols and limiting lengths or similar
That annoys me so much. Especially when the randomly generated line noise password I’m using doesn’t happen to include one of the three punctuation characters they need to be “secure”.
That sounds not ya I’m sure it stops a , as long as the actual password is also strong. IMO there’s still some vulnerability. If someone finds out your password and notices thepattern ‘pass+Site’, then they mighttryyon another site.
Also why it’s a good idea to have a few emails yo use across multiple sites.
The greatest threat is password databases being leaked from the services you use. Not your phone or laptop. Physical access to a device is a pretty high security bar.
If you don’t let people make notes of passwords they use one crap memorable password for everything. Let them store it, and advise them to do it somewhere encrypted. Ta da! Password manager.
Only if you’re using a third-party password manager, rather than something stored/managed locally.
Is that hard to do? And how do you access it remotely from your phone for instance?
I’m using KeepassXC, which has a browser integration that is quite good, and a local database. I synchronize it to my devices (using Syncthing, so it’s p2p). The database is encrypted with a pretty good password, and a key file. the key file has never and will hopefully never be transported via internet. The database is synced to a server I’ve rented as well, but never the key.
It’s not perfect, but potential attackers would need to
a) have access to one of my daily devices (the server won’t be enough, since they need the key file)
b) crack my password
Obviously, for someone dedicated this is still quite reasonable, but then again, I don’t think that’s my threat profile. The chance of getting caught up in a larger breach is a basically zero once you use your own solution, and it should be reasonably safe, if you don’t do anything stupid.
They would also need to know what you are using in the first place. Since fewer people do this it does make it a bit safer.
Oof, I barely understand most of that so definitely over my head I think. It sounds like you’ve made a good system for yourself though, nice job!
I could’ve phrased some things simpler, haha
But yeah, I’m quite happy with it. KeepassXC is a local password manager, and Syncthing lets you synchronize files and folders across devices, and it uses Peer-to-Peer (p2p) technology, so unlike something like Google drive you’re not relying on some could server, it just transfers between your devices directly.
It’s not plug and play to install, but not that hard either. But still, I can see that commercial options are a lot easier for many people c:
Syncthing sounds like a nice app in general. I might need to look into that.
I store mine in a selfhosted Nextcloud instance, KeepassDX on Android supports accessing it directly. Works perfectly and even provides an autofill service for Android. Very easy and very convenient.
That’s the neat part, you don’t.
Security and convenience are opposites. You have to decide if you want a local-only manager that is more secure, a sync service like syncthing that you can set up yourself, or a third-party cloud app like LastPass (which has been compromised at least once that I know of).
Personally I just do all my email and banking on my desktop at home, and it’s actually only inconvenienced me a few times over the years.
I store mine in a selfhosted Nextcloud instance accessible only via a Nebula overlay network (alternative to tailscale) and it’s both convenient and secure.
Sticking to desktop only wouldn’t be realistic for me unfortunately. Sounds like the solutions aren’t quite there yet for an average user.
They are, just use a normal one (I use bitwarden) that you can access from everywhere and protect it with 2FA.
The goal is to have varied, secure passwords across everything.
I’ve heard a lot of people mention that one so I think I’ll check it out. Thanks for recommendation.
Absolutely. LastPass and others have already had data breaches.
you literally described the exact use case for password managers. in security, it’s not about IF you get breached, it’s WHEN and how to recover from it. this includes cloud password managers. you can hack all the data you want from these companies but any reputable password manager company will employ a Zero Trust model where your data is stored encrypted. they can completely upend the company and destroy their whole infrastructure, but they still can’t do shit unless they have your master pass or a time machine.
Others?
I came up with a formula for my passwords - as easy to remember as a single password and makes a unique login for every site feasible without a password manager. Can be updated as often as you like and all you gotta do is remember the latest version of the formula. At the very least, the hashes will be different and it’d take someone having more than two of my passwords to figure out the pattern.
I also use over 100 email aliases with my own domain name so that my most important accounts have a separate login that isn’t a common domain that wouldn’t be easy for someone to guess.
It would take a lot of concentrated effort for someone to get at any of my important accounts, and even my less important ones would be pretty difficult to get into even if multiple accounts are compromised, due to using a smaller pool of aliases under common domains for less important accounts.
Someone got into half a dozen of my accounts a few years ago and I finally started taking security seriously.
At this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely in your accounts?
Not really though. Once the password has been leaked, it needs to be cracked. And that usually doesn’t happen when the password is strong enough.
Except the password wasn’t hashed but then the company belongs to get sued to bankruptcy
Since you can never now for sure how a company handles hashing, always assume the worst. You will fare better.
That’s also assuming they used proper salts and a strong hashing algorithm.
Also MITM and or phishing attacks are not super common but can also depreciate your common password very quickly.
Always layered defense. If it’s not 1 thing, it could be another.
Unique passwords are just one facet on a multi-layered security defense.
I think phishing is by far the most common way to get passwords.
I saw a guy at work fall victim to one. Looks like it’s from some customer he knows, links to document on Office365 or similar, enter username and password and swearing because it’s “lost them”.
I went, “What URL is that?”
He looked at his screen for a second. “Fuck.”
“How many passwords have you given it?”
“My work ones and my bank ones.”
“Better change those then, hadn’t you?”
That is a really bad take.
The meme is expressing that a strong password is a lot worse when reused.
Even if one agrees with your take, the meme is accurate.
But your take is really bad because “it needs to be leaked and cracked” ignores so many alternative ways to steal passwords. Xxs keylogger, mitm, phishing… And some of these attacks are making it really difficult or unlikely to succeed. E.g. the chance of a phishing email for your bank or apple icloud is much more likely than a phishing email about e.g. your babyphone. Segregation of accounts is also important because obviously if you use the same password 30 times, then there are 30 places to leak your password and some might use md5.
But a strong password doesn’t help you with phishing attacks and such attacks. It really only protects you against database breaches and direct password Bruteforce.
Reusing a password doesn’t destroy the whole security aspect you get from a strong password like the meme implies. Just some of it.
Of course you should both not reuse passwords and use strong passwords
You have successfully missed my point, and apparently your own???
I am not saying strong passwords are protecting you from phishing. I never did.
The meme is saying reusing the password “ruins” a lot of the security benefits of a strong password. And it does. Like you agree.
So for you, reusing passwords… That is what I am taking about, as you expressed the reusing passwords is fine because it has to be cracked and with strong password that is difficult. So I was criticizing your statement. I don’t know how you manage to understand anything else from it honestly. And yes!!! Reusing passwords makes phishing attacks easier and more successful.
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What exactly did you think the point of the meme was?
Use a passphrase, so much better and more secure
But that doesn’t do anything to mitigate using the same password/phrase on multiple services.
[ admin ]
Same mail at a shady provider
hey guys sort the comments by new for some free lemmy account passwords (
joke)I clicked old by mistake and it actually worked!
Well once you get passkeys implemented in every website. Now they’ll need to steal your phone. Haha.
I get the joke.
But related real talk phones get got a lot. They won’t need to steal your phone they’ll just hack it like every other computer on the planet.
You don’t have to look much for the evidence.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/ileakage-flaw-can-prompt-apples-safari-to-expose-passwords-sensitive-data
