I’ve been thinking about having a more secure password management since ages. At first, my only concern was to share my bookmarks and history between my different computers (at that time, phones were conveniently left out of my scope). Since Firefox was my browser of choice, I decided to go for Foxmarks (now called XMarks and available for more browsers).
However, it soon became apparent that my natural lazyness came back and I synchronized my passwords too… in the cloud. After Firefox brought out-of-the-box synchronization through Sync, I continued to use the feature, not listening to the little voice in my head telling me it was a big security problem. I mean, Mozilla could secure the storage the way it wanted, I still felt not really safe… but lazyness prevailed. It was not until I had to change the way I synchronized stuff thanks to Firefox new Sync feature that I decided it was more than enough: I searched for a better way for my passwords to be available on all my devices.
The heart of the matter of choosing a good password is the following: I want my passwords to be easy to remember and easy to type while at the same time I want them to be impossible to either guess or crack. Usability versus security. This is somewhat summarized in this xkcd comis:
Some online service providers (such as Google and Dropbox) offer an interesting feature to defeat the natural tendency of users to choose easy-to-guess passwords, 2-steps authentication. This means you not only have to enter the password, you also have to provide another mean of authentication. Both previous providers use a code generated from some parameters known by both parties (provider and customer) but also time, so that guessing the code is only possible during a short amount of time (generally a minute). Another form of 2nd step is offered by banks as they send a code on your phone while you make an online transaction with your credit card, and then you have to enter it on the site to prove you’re the cardholder.
Some other providers even delegate authentication to third-party providers such as Google (always it) or Github. A well known process to do that is OAuth2. OAuth2 could solve the many passwords problem if all service providers would offer delegation. Unfortunately, most of them prefer to do authentication on their own (as well as keep identities their own, but that’s a story for another day). Even more unfortunate is the fact that they only offer traditional login/password authentication challenges. Back to square one…
Of course, I could make an effort to create a single hard-to-crack password… but with so many applications around, this is completely out of the question (or even impossible) to craft such a password for each one. None will advise to use the same password for all applications - as a hacker discovering the password on a site will be able to access all of them, but some advocate to prepend or append the domain name to the password. Alas, any simple automatic rule can easily be defeated by the means of automation cracking on the other side, so this should never ever been done - if you value the security of your accounts.
The answer is very simple: for each application, create a dedicated hard-to-crack and impossible-to-remember password and store them somewhere safe. This place of safety can then be secured with a a-little-easier-to-crack and possible-to-remember master password - the key to the Holy Grail. In essence, this describes a solution known as a password manager. I had a couple of requirements for such a software:
- Open Source
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I prefer having an Open Source solution when possible as I think that qualified people can (at least in theory) perform a security audit on it. A closed source solution means security through obfuscation and this just doesn’t work against real threats.
- Multi-devices
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Yes, I’m one of those people that not only have multiple computers (office, desktop, laptop) with different Operating Systems (Windows and OSX) but also 2 phones and a tablet. So I want a solution that is compatible with all of those.
- Configurable authentication
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This requirement is very important as it not only let me choose how to authenticate into the store (e.g. password or key) but also increases the security of the solution.
- Best practices
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Last but not least, I require security best practices to be implemented, such as hashing, salting, a slow hashing algorithm, etc.
Having chosen my password manager, now comes the hard part: should I keep my password store on a USB key I always keep by me (and a copy in a secure location, just to be sure), on my laptop I carry everywhere or in the cloud? This amounts to the same problem as before, security or usability? I’ve decided to store it the cloud, on a provider infrastructure secured by 2-steps authentication. I’ve also ensured that this store is made avalaible on my different devices, though I’m not unaware that a chain is as strong as its weakest link. With my current setup, I’m not sure I’m completely free of any prying effort by 3 letters agencies, or more precisely I’m sure I’m not. However, I believe I’ve increased my robustness to online intrusion by several degrees of magnitude and that should prevent script kiddies to play some nasty tricks on me. Your turn, now…