Major Password Managers Exposed: Design Weaknesses Enable Vault Attacks

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Researchers Identify Design Weaknesses in Popular Password Managers

Researchers at ETH Zurich and Università della Svizzera italiana have identified design weaknesses in major password managers that enable vault attacks, potentially compromising users’ passwords.

Study Examines Four Popular Password Managers

The study examined four popular password managers: Bitwarden, LastPass, Dashlane, and 1Password.

Cloud-Based Password Managers Vulnerable to Attacks

Cloud-based password managers store users’ passwords in encrypted vaults, which are created and encrypted by the user’s client software using a cryptographic key derived from the user’s master password.

However, the researchers demonstrated that attackers who compromise a server storing the password vaults can, in some cases, recover users’ passwords, fully compromise the vault, modify its contents, and more.

Attack Scenarios and Design Weaknesses

The researchers probed the password managers with 12 distinct attack scenarios against Bitwarden, 7 against LastPass, 6 against Dashlane, and 3 against 1Password.

These attacks exploited design weaknesses such as missing key authentication, lack of authenticated encryption, poor key separation, and legacy cryptographic support.

Severe Outcomes and Proposed Mitigations

The researchers found that these design weaknesses can allow attackers to manipulate keys, metadata, or ciphertext, leading to severe outcomes such as full vault compromise, loss of confidentiality, or loss of integrity.

The researchers proposed a set of changes to mitigate these attacks, including the use of specialized password manager clients to implement a forced migration to a new vault format.

Vendors’ Response and Recommendations

The affected vendors were notified of the research many months before it was made public and have since moved to fix some of these exploitable design flaws.

The researchers also noted that while most users are unlikely to be targeted via these attacks, which require considerable skills and knowledge from the attackers, they cannot exclude the possibility that advanced threat actors may have already exploited these vulnerabilities.

The best mitigation for high-risk parties is to trust that vendors will rapidly and effectively patch their systems, and the researchers have engaged with the affected vendors to assist them in this process.

Importance of Examining End-to-End Encryption

The study highlights the importance of examining the security of end-to-end encryption in commercial services, particularly in password managers that claim zero-knowledge encryption.

The researchers’ findings demonstrate that even with robust encryption, design weaknesses can still be exploited to compromise users’ sensitive data.