Seven years ago I created a password manager. And a few days ago I pushed out the last release for it, notifying users that nothing else will come now. Yes, with the previous release being from 2019, this might have been obvious. Now it’s official however, PfP: Pain-free Passwords is no longer being developed.

I certainly learned a lot from this adventure, and I really like the product which came out of this. Unfortunately, a password manager is a rather time-consuming hobby, and my focus has been elsewhere for a while already.

This doesn’t mean that PfP is going away. In fact, it will probably work well for quite a while until a browser change or something like that makes it unusable. Sync functionality in particular depends on third parties however, and this one already started falling apart.

This little adventure began with me being annoyed at DMARC aggregate reports. My domain doesn’t have enough email traffic to justify routing DMARC emails to some third-party analytics service, yet I want to take a brief glance at them. And the format of these emails makes that maximally inconvenient: download the attachment, unpack it, look through some (always messy but occasionally not even human-readable) XML code. There had to be a better way.

This could have been a Thunderbird extension, processing the email attachment in order to produce some nicer output. Unfortunately, Thunderbird extensions no longer have this kind of power. So I went for another option: having the email server (OpenSMTPD) convert the email as it comes in.

Since I already had the implementation details of OpenSMTPD filters figured out, this wasn’t as complicated as it sounds. The resulting code is on GitHub but I still want to document the process for future me and anyone else who might have a similar issue.

Note: This article is also available in Korean.

As discussed before, South Korea’s banking websites demand installation of various so-called security applications. At the same time, we’ve seen that these applications like TouchEn nxKey and IPinside lack auto-update functionality. So even in case of security issues, it is almost impossible to deliver updates to users timely.

And that’s only two applications. Korea’s banking websites typically expect around five applications, and it will be different applications for different websites. That’s a lot of applications to install and to keep up-to-date.

Luckily, the Veraport application by Wizvera will take care of that. This application will automatically install everything necessary to use a particular website. And it will also install updates if deemed necessary.

If this sounds like a lot of power: that’s because it is. And so Veraport already made the news as the vehicle of an attack by North Korean hackers.

Back then everybody was quick to shift the blame to the compromised web servers. I now took a deeper dive into how Veraport works and came to the conclusion: its approach is inherently dangerous.

As of Veraport 3.8.6.5 (released on February 28), all the reported security issues seem to be fixed. Getting users to update will take a long time however. Also, the dangerous approach of allowing Veraport customers to distribute arbitrary software remains of course.

Half a year after the LastPass breach started in August 2022, information on it remains sparse. It took until December 2022 for LastPass to admit losing their users’ partially encrypted vault data. This statement was highly misleading, e.g. making wrong claims about the protection level provided by the encryption. Some of the failures to protect users only became apparent after some time, such as many accounts configured with a dangerously low password iterations setting, the company hasn’t admitted them to this day.

Despite many questions being raised, LastPass maintained strict radio silence since December. Until yesterday they published an article with details of the breach. If you were hoping to get answers: nope. If you look closely, the article again carefully avoids making definitive statements. There is very little to learn here.

TL;DR: The breach was helped by a lax security policy, an employee was accessing critical company data from their home computer. Also, contrary to what LastPass claimed originally, business customers using Federated Login Services are very much affected by this breach. In fact, the attackers might be able to decrypt company data without using any computing resources on bruteforcing master passwords.

Update (2023-02-28): I found additional information finally explaining the timeline here. So the breach affects LastPass users who had an active LastPass account between August 20 and September 16, 2022. The “Timeline of the breach” section has been rewritten accordingly.

Note: This article is also available in Korean.

A while back I wrote my first overview of South Korea’s unusual approach to online security. After that I published two articles on specific applications. While I’m not done yet, this is enough information to draw some intermediate conclusions.

The most important question is: all the security issues and bad practices aside, does this approach to banking security make sense? Do these applications have the potential to make people more secure when rolled out mandatorily nation-wide?

TL;DR: I think that the question above can be answered with a clear “no.” The approaches make little sense given actual attack scenarios, they tend to produce security theater rather than actual security. And while security theater can sometimes be useful, the issues in question have proper solutions.

I recently switched from VirtualBox to KVM for my virtualization needs. While this approach has clear advantages such as not requiring custom kernel drivers, the downside is that snapshots aren’t currently supported for Windows 11. And since I don’t want applications I analyze to corrupt my main Windows VM, I decided that I should run these in freshly created Windows VMs.

The issue with this approach is: setting up a new Windows VM is fairly time-consuming. Not only is it necessary to answer a number of questions during installation, installing the proper guest tools for KVM is non-trivial as well. And I also rely on some further applications for my work.

Luckily, Windows installation supports answer files which make this task far easier. With the right answer file and some scripts, setting up a Windows VM is a fully automated task that takes half an hour and none of my attention. The necessary information was rather scattered and often outdated, so I decided to put it all into one blog post.

Note: This article is also available in Korean.

Normally, when you navigate to your bank’s website you have little reason to worry about impersonations. The browser takes care of verifying that you are really connected to the right server, and that your connection is safely encrypted. It will indicate this by showing a lock icon in the address bar.

So even if you are connected to a network you don’t trust (such as open WiFi), nothing can go wrong. If somebody tries to impersonate your bank, your browser will notice. And it will refuse connecting.

This is achieved by means of a protocol called Transport Layer Security (TLS). It relies on a number of trusted Certification Authorities (CAs) to issue certificates to websites. These certificates allow websites to prove their identity.

When investigating South Korea’s so-called security applications I noticed that all of them add their own certification authorities that browsers have to trust. This weakens the protection provided by TLS considerably, as misusing these CAs allows impersonating any website towards a large chunk of South Korean population. This puts among other things the same banking transactions at risk that these applications are supposed to protect.

The conclusion of my blog posts on the LastPass breach and on Bitwarden’s design flaws is invariably: a strong master password is important. This is especially the case if you are a target somebody would throw considerable resources at. But everyone else might still get targeted due to flaws like password managers failing to keep everyone on current security settings.

There is lots of confusion about what constitutes a strong password however. How strong is my current password? Also, how strong is strong enough? These questions don’t have easy answers. I’ll try my best to explain however.

If you are only here for recommendations on finding a good password, feel free to skip ahead to the Choosing a truly strong password section.

Note: This article is also available in Korean.

On our tour of South Korea’s so-called security applications we’ve already took a look at TouchEn nxKey, an application meant to combat keyloggers by … checks notes … making keylogging easier. Today I want to shed some light on another application that many people in South Korea had to install on their computers: IPinside LWS Agent by Interezen.

The stated goal of the application is retrieving your “real” IP address to prevent online fraud. I found however that it collects way more data. And while it exposes this trove of data to any website asking politely, it doesn’t look like it is all too helpful for combating actual fraud.

In the aftermath of the LastPass breach it became increasingly clear that LastPass didn’t protect their users as well as they should have. When people started looking for alternatives, two favorites emerged: 1Password and Bitwarden. But do these do a better job at protecting sensitive data?

For 1Password, this question could be answered fairly easily. The secret key functionality decreases usability, requiring the secret key to be moved to each new device used with the account. But the fact that this random value is required to decrypt the data means that the encrypted data on 1Password servers is almost useless to potential attackers. It cannot be decrypted even for weak master passwords.

As to Bitwarden, the media mostly repeated their claim that the data is protected with 200,001 PBKDF2 iterations: 100,001 iterations on the client side and another 100,000 on the server. This being twice the default protection offered by LastPass, it doesn’t sound too bad. Except: as it turns out, the server-side iterations are designed in such a way that they don’t offer any security benefit. What remains are 100,000 iterations performed on the client side, essentially the same protection level as for LastPass.

Mind you, LastPass isn’t only being criticized for using a default iterations count that is three time lower than the current OWASP recommendation. LastPass also failed to encrypt all data, a flaw that Bitwarden doesn’t seem to share. LastPass also kept the iterations count for older accounts dangerously low, something that Bitwarden hopefully didn’t do either (Edit: yes, they did this, some accounts have considerably lower iteration count). LastPass also chose to downplay the breach instead of suggesting meaningful mitigation steps, something that Bitwarden hopefully wouldn’t do in this situation. Still, the protection offered by Bitwarden isn’t exactly optimal either.

Edit (2023-01-23): Bitwarden increased the default client-side iterations to 350,000 a few days ago. So far this change only applies to new accounts, and it is unclear whether they plan to upgrade existing accounts automatically. And today OWASP changed their recommendation to 600,000 iterations, it has been adjusted to current hardware.

Edit (2023-01-24): I realized that some of my concerns were already voiced in Bitwarden’s 2018 Security Assessment. Linked to it in the respective sections.