- Jul 22, 2014
- 2,525
Everything's fine now. Patch. Keep using them. Move along
Password management applications, recommended by many security experts as the only viable way to deal with large sets of passwords that are unique and sufficiently complex, introduce their own set of problems – namely the general fallibility of software.
A group of security researchers called TeamSIK from the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT) in Darmstadt, Germany, on Tuesday published its security assessment of nine popular password management applications on Android devices and found them all wanting.
"The overall results were extremely worrying and revealed that password manager applications, despite their claims, do not provide enough protection mechanisms for the stored passwords and credentials," the group said. "Instead, they abuse the users' confidence and expose them to high risks."
TeamSIK looked at My Passwords, Informaticore Password Manager, LastPass, Keeper, F-Secure KEY, Dashlane, Hide Pictures Keep Safe Vault, Avast Passwords, and 1Password.
In each application, the group identified one or more security vulnerabilities, all of which were reported to app makers and were fixed prior to the publication of the group's findings. Among the better-known password managers, fix times are respectable – a week to a month in most cases. In other words, the bugs disclosed today have been fixed. Make sure you're patched, because now hackers have all the information they need to exploit vulnerable versions of the software.
The flaws identified were sometimes serious, such as storing the master password entered by the user in plaintext or using hard-coded crypto-keys in application code. In other cases, design flaws allowed the researchers to extract supposedly secure credentials using a third-party app.
The researchers observe that many of the apps fail to account for the possibility of clipboard sniffing, which may be done to capture credentials that have been copied into memory in order to paste them into a password entry interface.
Complicating the vulnerability picture, many of these apps implement convenience features that affect app security. For example, some of the apps include a built-in web browser, which expands the scope of possible flaws. Also, the researchers found auto-fill functions in applications could be used to capture stored secrets through "hidden phishing" attacks.
Here's a rundown of the problems found and disclosed today by the team:
more in the link above
Password management applications, recommended by many security experts as the only viable way to deal with large sets of passwords that are unique and sufficiently complex, introduce their own set of problems – namely the general fallibility of software.
A group of security researchers called TeamSIK from the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT) in Darmstadt, Germany, on Tuesday published its security assessment of nine popular password management applications on Android devices and found them all wanting.
"The overall results were extremely worrying and revealed that password manager applications, despite their claims, do not provide enough protection mechanisms for the stored passwords and credentials," the group said. "Instead, they abuse the users' confidence and expose them to high risks."
TeamSIK looked at My Passwords, Informaticore Password Manager, LastPass, Keeper, F-Secure KEY, Dashlane, Hide Pictures Keep Safe Vault, Avast Passwords, and 1Password.
In each application, the group identified one or more security vulnerabilities, all of which were reported to app makers and were fixed prior to the publication of the group's findings. Among the better-known password managers, fix times are respectable – a week to a month in most cases. In other words, the bugs disclosed today have been fixed. Make sure you're patched, because now hackers have all the information they need to exploit vulnerable versions of the software.
The flaws identified were sometimes serious, such as storing the master password entered by the user in plaintext or using hard-coded crypto-keys in application code. In other cases, design flaws allowed the researchers to extract supposedly secure credentials using a third-party app.
The researchers observe that many of the apps fail to account for the possibility of clipboard sniffing, which may be done to capture credentials that have been copied into memory in order to paste them into a password entry interface.
Complicating the vulnerability picture, many of these apps implement convenience features that affect app security. For example, some of the apps include a built-in web browser, which expands the scope of possible flaws. Also, the researchers found auto-fill functions in applications could be used to capture stored secrets through "hidden phishing" attacks.
Here's a rundown of the problems found and disclosed today by the team:
more in the link above
