Slashdot Mirror
Chrome's Insane Password Security Strategy
jones_supa writes "One day web developer Elliott Kember decided to switch from Safari to Chrome and in the process, discovered possibly a serious weakness with local password management in Chrome. The settings import tool forced the passwords to be always imported, which lead Kember to further investigate how the data can be accessed. For those who actually bother to look at the 'Saved passwords' page, it turns out that anyone with physical access can peek all the passwords in clear text very easily with a couple of mouse clicks. This spurred a lengthy discussion featuring Justin Schuh, the head of Chrome security, who says Kember is wrong and that this behavior of Chrome has been evaluated for years and is not going to change."
I know it has been discussed many times to password lock access to stored passwords, though because browsers are not user-specific, this has not been done.
Solution: If security is important to you, don't be lazy.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
If your browser can read the passwords and use them on the web, so can a local user. No surprise. Unless you set a master password (firefox offers this, not sure about chrome), there's no way to fix this. It's just how computers work.
Saved passwords have always been stored in a way that they can be recovered easily.
By definition, saving passwords will always be insecure, unless the program has a way to encrypt them using another key provided by the user.
They MUST be recoverable to be of use, because the plain text password must be available to the program for transmission to the web page.
How about the fact that Chrome can import passwords stored in Safari to begin with?
So Safari has some security issues as well. Where is the "master key" to export passwords?
I guess the underlying message is that if you leave a computer unattended the information is accessible to anyone. E-mail, passwords, documents, MP3s, etc.
This is a convenience feature and 99% rather have the convenience of a cached web passwords on their personal computer then worrying about something walking by.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
I've seen this on several sites, is this news to anyone?? Did you miss it many years ago when this was added? You know what, when someone is physically on my machine while its logged in, they can also send emails from my account!! Its just right there ready to go! We need to do something about this!
../../Set Masterpassword
face it : chrome sucks at security, but that's no big surprise.
Passwords have to be stored in a decryptable form, because the browser needs them decrypted to fill in the password fields or to respond to HTTP authentication responses. That means that any malware with access to the browser can get those passwords in decrypted form too. A master password doesn't help, the malware can just get the passwords after I've entered the master password to decrypt them for use (assuming it can't just get the master password when I enter it). The only thing encrypted password storage really protects against is someone with access to the physical storage media but not the running system, or essentially stolen mobile devices (phones or laptops). On those you probably shouldn't be storing passwords at all, because any reversible encryption is too easy to crack using off-line attacks with modern hardware.
It's similar to my objection to the old "don't write down your passwords" thing: the risk of a remote attack against easy-to-remember passwords is much higher than the risk of an attacker physically getting into the locked drawer of my desk in the locked area of the secured and patrolled building my office is in, and if the attacker has gotten into the locked drawer in my desk I've got much bigger security worries and the attacker has much juicier targets he can go after.
You can secure this in Firefox, there is no option to do so in Chrome.
I don't think people realize that
The script is indented, but stupid slashcode ignores characters
While stupid slashcode ignores pretty much any 21st century concept, it does support an <ecode> tag, which turns each pair of leading spaces into a level of indention. Bizarre, but workable.
It also supports the <tt> tag, which turns each single leading space into a level of indention. Less bizarre, more workable.
thing
thing indented
thing indented more
another thing
done indenting
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Firefox has the option to protect saved passwords with a master passwords and if you already unlocked the password store, in order to read password from the GUI, you need to unlock it again
Exactly. Mozilla's email client Thunderbird also uses a Master Password to unlock the view-ability of the stored passwords.
For those who insist on saying that chrome's security method is good enough consider this: How many people use separate log-in's for the "Family" computer that stays on most of the time? Not very many I'd imagine, just too much trouble for most to deal with. This means that both other family members as well as house guests can casually access all those passwords in no time.
Even if you do use different log-ins consider this type of common scenario: Your son or daughter has a "friend" over and they are cruising the web on her account doing whatever. Say that they are reading some news item or article together when the daughter gets up to go the bathroom. Do you think for one second that she is going to lock the computer and force her friend to wait to finish what she is doing? No. Her "friend" will then be able to casually and quickly access all those passwords and type them into her iphone for safe keeping before your daughter gets back. She now pwns your daughters facebook account, bank account, cellphone account and who knows what else.
How can anyone with a straight face say that is an acceptable security method? The fact that my open source email client has an easily useable default master password system proves that it is something that chrome could easily implement as well, hell, just copy the open-source code from thunderbird if you need to...
To be quite frank; when I think of Google or Microsoft "my security" is not something I honestly expect from them, and this newest revelation just further confirms that perception.
Maybe you didn't read the article and what is being discussed. The reason Google is being singled out is because one guy discovered an issue with Chrome and then Google's top chief for Chrome security had a crappy response.
No he had exactly the right response, but there's a lot of morons (at proven by the threads on this story) who think they understand security and don't.
Don't do this. It basically puts your passwords (their building blocks, really) in clear text in your command history. It's not any greater security than Chrome has when someone has physical access, and it is significantly less convenient.
This thread is a goldmine of security theatre. Any hiring personnel could probably also use this to weed out folks who dont actually understand security.
Fantastic. I don't think that you realize that the issue people are concerned about is that Chrome will easily display these password in plain text to any user who happens to sit down at an unlocked computer.
Now to some of the silly supporters of this bizarre behavior:
If I have access to an unlocked user account, I can already: install keyloggers, corupt data, pwn their machine, rape their dog, etc...
Yes, yes you could. But just as there are different levels of security, there are different levels of "hackers". Not everyone out there is a l33t haxor who can own your PC with nothing more than a paper clip, a rubber band and an old FM radio. Security is also intended to stop "casual hackers". A "friend" who is just borrowing your browser for a few minutes. A neighbor who just dropped by and needs to check their email quickly. Your soon to be ex-spouse who wants to check up on what sites you've been visiting...etc. Having a UAC prompt / sudo prompt would at least stop these casual users from finding all your passwords in plain text.
If the browser stores the password, someone could just log onto the site and change it
Yes, but unless they: (1) validated the password change in email, (2) deleted the email notifying the user of password change, (3) changed the browser to have the new password stored, the user would likely notice the change pretty quick. I know I'd notice password changes of this type when my (a) phone, (b) laptop, (c) other PC all stopped being able to access the site that was changed.
People shouldn't store their passwords in the browser....they should use: [insert favorite password storage site here]
Agreed. But in this case, Google should just remove the feature and redirect the user to one of those sites.
The way they have it implemented is:
(a) stupid
(b) insecure
and
(c) dishonest as their messages imply that passwords are stored securely.
And their idiotic defense of this behavior makes me wonder if Google even bothers hiring security-aware people at all. It concerns me enough that even though I don't store passwords in any browser, I'm uninstalling Chrome when I get home. If they are this lax about basic password security, I am very worried about what other stupid security policies they have in Chrome.