Jefferson's Wheel

Bleeping Computer has an article about our work on a more secure password manager: Horcrux Is a Password Manager Designed for Security and Paranoid Users, 4 July 2017.

Two researchers from the University of Virginia have developed a new password manager prototype that works quite differently from existing password manager clients.

The research team describes their password manager — which they named Horcrux — as “a password manager for paranoids,” due to its security and privacy-focused features and a unique design used for handling user passwords, both while in transit and at rest.

There are two main differences between Horcrux and currently available password manager clients.

The first is how Horcrux inserts user credentials inside web pages. Regular password managers do this by filling in the login form with the user’s data.
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The second feature that makes Horcrux stand out compared to other password manager clients is how it stores user credentials.

Compared to classic solutions, Horcrux doesn’t trust one single password store but spreads user credentials across multiple servers. This means that if an attacker manages to gain access to one of the servers, he won’t gain access to all of the user’s passwords, limiting the damage of any security incident.
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More details about the Horcrux design and implementation are available in the research team’s paper, entitled “Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids”.

PCWord has a story about CNBC’s attempt to “help” people measure their password security: CNBC just collected your password and shared it with marketers: An exercise in password security went terribly wrong, security experts say, 29 March 2016.

Adrienne Porter Felt, a software engineer with Google’s Chrome security team, spotted that the article wasn’t delivered using SSL/TLS (Secure Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security) encryption.

SSL/TLS encrypts the connection between a user and a website, scrambling the data that is sent back and forth. Without SSL/TLS, someone one the same network can see data in clear text and, in this case, any password sent to CNBC.

“Worried about security? Enter your password into this @CNBC website (over HTTP, natch). What could go wrong,” Felt wrote on Twitter. “Alternately, feel free to tweet your password @ me and have the whole security community inspect it for you.”

The form also sent passwords to advertising networks and other parties with trackers on CNBC’s page, according to Ashkan Soltani, a privacy and security researcher, who posted a screenshot.

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Despite saying the tool would not store passwords, traffic analysis showed it was actually storing them in a Google Docs spreadsheet, according to Kane York, who works on the Let’s Encrypt project.

(Posted on April 1, but this is actually a real story, as hard as that might be to believe.)