Add-on: same password, same identity.

177 comments

The only good passwords are those you don't know yourself because they are randomly generated and all stored in your password manager of choice.
- Until some locked down tv/console type device asks me for a password.
  
  Then you look up the random string of 36 characters once, think "why did I make this one 36 characters" as you painstakingly type it in with a TV remote, then immediately forget it as soon as you're logged in.
  
  I use an off-line libre password manager for several bad designed goverment stuff that only accept numbers as passwords or don't allow to paste it.
  It's not that hard and I easily get used to it. I read it, type it and forget it again.
  
  Some password managers support generating random passphrases like "correctbatteryhorsestaple." They're still a pain to punch in on a remote, but much easier to keep track of where you are in the password and avoid transcription errors.
  
  I hate this shit so much, even when I can do semi okay because I use a Shield TV the logins are still a pain in the ass.
- it's all fun and games until you don't have access to your password manager
  
  Well that's on you then.
  1 Keep encrypted backups of your password database, so that you can migrate to something else if you need to.
  B. Make sure to have your password database synced to your phone or accessible in some other way when you're out and about.
  III. If purely offline and local password manager with no syncing, have a way for a trusted person to be able to access it, if you need them to.
  • Lastly, attempt to not suffer memory loss and forget your main credentials to the password manager.
- depends on the password manager....
  also, the length of the password is WAY more important than it being randomly generated as long as it's not in a password dictionary somewhere. I use 20+ character passphrases that i can easily remember everywhere for instance
  
  My strategy is to have a persistent short passphrase that's within every password I use, and pair it with a silly bastardization of the service I have an account for. So, for example, if my passphrase were hunter2 (lol) and I had an account on Netflix, my password for Netflix might be something like hunter2NutFlex. Because of this, I can manage my own passwords in basic text as "code NutFlex" because the "code" portion is encrypted in my own fucking brain. If Netflix gets hacked, somebody has a password that only works with Netflix, and they'd need my text file as a Rosetta Stone to acquire my other passwords. Not impossible, but who the fuck am I and why would anybody dig that deep to do that to me?
  I'm no IT expert, so somebody tell me if this is a stupid and overly vulnerable strategy. I thought I was pretty brilliant for coming up with this and rolling it out several years ago.
- Backup recovery phrase is a good way 2
- Except you DO know the password to your password manager, which makes it about as secure as just writing them down and keeping them in the house.

Imagine a site telling you "Sorry, you can't use asdf123 as your password: you've already used it on that other site".
- That's not as far fetched as it sounds. Any website worth its salt will store your password as a hash, so if they started sharing the hashes with each other they could prevent you from reusing passwords without changing much security-wise
  
  Any website worth its salt will salt the hash as well...
- It would be better if you had a local tool telling you that - one that you control and only exists on your personal devices, kind of like secure messaging platforms such as Signal.
  Another great later would be for all compromised passwords found in breaches to never be usable anywhere ever again, thus helping to thwart the most common form of breach we see today: credential stuffing.
- Sorry you can't use *******
  That wouldn't help that much
  
  This was supposed to be a joke; of course it wouldn't.

Counterpoint: Password Manager = One point of failure
Multiple Strong Passwords that have to be changed every 3 months even to sign on to your cornerstore rewards program without a password manager? Guess you're never accessing any account older than 3 months because you've forgotten th3 b1lli0n$ oF s+r0ng p4s5w0rds Y0u h4Ve cr3atEd!
- Actually you are the single point of failure
  https://xkcd.com/538/
  
  I mean yeah, the security benefit from being un-notable isnt negligible
- That's...not a counterpoint.
  You can have strong authentication on your central password manager, and have an encrypted container protecting it.
  There is no logical argument against password vaults as a concept. There are bad implementations of specific password vaults, but a password vault is the answer for the highest possible password based security available in 2023.
  
  And figuring out which password managers to use is not a task which a lot of people know where to start, and it is STILL a single point of failure
  
  What makes it completely unusable for me is that I don’t have a single work computer I use. I have to bounce around computers at work, my personal phone, computer, work iPad, etc.
  
  I have no idea about how to protect a password manager with an encrypted container.
  And to be honest with you, it's not something I'm likely to do even if you do attempt to explain the 60 minute long $10 18-step process to me. Or however long it takes and whatever it costs.
  And really, for all my ignorant ass knows you could've just as well been encouraging me to get malware and I'd be none the wiser.
- Okay and now let's get into threat modelling and risk management.
  What is the purpose of a password manager? What are the possible threats against them, and what are those against singular passwords for services? What is the risk of each of those?
  
  Guys, before you argue with me, password security is something that EVERYONE in the 1st world has to deal with, not just tech nerds. If you need to grow up around computers or take a class for it to be a good form of security, its a shit form of security for the general public

So your password is cardboard fort?
- hunter2
  
  It's just *******
  
  That's amazing! I've got the same ~~combination~~ password on my ~~luggage~~ account!

Just use a password manager, then you get the benefits of having a single password to remember without the security-related downsides.
- I never got over the fact that I somehow need to trust to an absurdly high degree a proprietary software to store ALL my passwords. Is this really a good idea?
  
  You can use KeePass, but you'll have to figure out a way to have your password vault available on other devices (can do it by using any cloud shares, i.e. GDrive). This way you'll be in charge of almost every aspect of your passwords. But you'll have to take care of backups and keep everything in sync.
  
  There are libre off-line password managers. Variants of Keepass for example.
  Indeed it's a bad idea to store passwords in a propietary system. Specially a cloud based one being hacked time to time, like 1password.
  
  It's the choice between trusting one company (or if you self host, trusting yourself) to have their security all in order and properly encrypt the password vault. Using one password for every site you use means that you have to trust each of those sites equally, because if one leaks your password because they have atrocious password policies (eg. storing it in plain text), it's leaked everywhere and you need to remember every place you used it before.
  Good password managers allow audits, and do at times still get hacked naturally (which isn't 100% preventable). Yet neither of these should result in passwords being leaked. Why? Because they properly secure your master password so it can't be reverse engineered to plain text, and without the master password your encrypted password vault is just a bunch of random bytes. And even in the extreme situation it did, you know to switch to a better password manager, and you have a nice big list of all the places where you need to change your password rather than trying to remember them all.
  Human memory is fallible and we want the least amount of effort, because of that we usually make bad passwords. Your average site does not have their password security up to date (There's almost a 0% chance not one of your passwords can be found here). If you data is encrypted accordingly, it doesn't matter if it gets leaked in any way or stolen by some rogue employee, so long as they do not have your master password. So yes, I'd say that's a good idea.
- So all my passwords are locked behind a single password? Isnt this essentially the same as using the same password for every site. In that they only need to cracl o e password to have access to everything?
  
  In theory, yes but if you use a good password manager and have a strong master password the encryption should be practically impossible to break. The fact that you only have to remember one password means that this password can and should be a very strong one. 20+ characters with upper and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols should take centuries to crack.
  
  You should be safe as long as your master password isn't small, less than 15 characters. The longer the password, the better. Personally what I do is use a pass phrase to make it easily memorable, and then use it as a base to inflate security somewhat artificially.
  Wrap the pass phrase around in brackets or symbols; mix lower/upper case; replace (or add to) a word in your pass phrase with one from a random other language, so instead of hello you type bonjour. Bonus points if you are able to replace even a few letters in your pass phrase with fancy diacritics, or fuck it add an emoji or two.
  Then again there are a LOT of other factors which go into security. Theoretically the lyrics of song are decent as a pass phrase but there's not much point if everyone knows what your favourite song is, or if you are learning Spanish then you'll replace the English words with Spanish.
  Unless you're in a position where you're targeted by nations or are working extremely high profile jobs like CEO or digital security you should be safe really with all these but as I said there's a lot to keep in mind.
  
  Just don't use your master password anywhere else than your password manager.
  If your password manager only works offline, then it is impossible to leak on the internet.
  
  Depends if you trust your password manager site more than either site you put the same pw into
  
  This is not necessarily true.
  For example, consider the case of a 1Password vault falling into the hands of an attacker. They do not have the option to just crack your password, as the password is mixed with a randomly generated value to ultimately derive the key. They would need to simultaneously brute force your password and that random value. This should almost be impossible. However, given access to a client that already has knowledge of the secret value, it would fall back to brute forcing the password.
- I have been wondering as of lately, I'm an old Bitwarden user and I use their generated passwords which are just a random mess for my eye, anyway when a leak occurs I usually tend to type my known passwords to match it with the leak lists, but now all this being auto generated and I be totally clueless of which is which, how would I ever notice if one of those more secure passwords are leaked?
  Does Bitwarden let you know of leaked passwords as Chrome and I think Firefox does? Because I don't recall having this info in hand.
  
  You can go into your vault and choose a password to see if it's been exposed on the web. It's a little check mark by the password.

It was literally a battle for me to have a strong unique password for our baby monitor... Wife was not happy about that but I came out on top.

Everyone talks about password managers these days, but isn't that telling the hackers exactly where to go to get all your passwords? Seems like a much higher chance of catastrophic failure to me if you have a single point of entry.
- Yes that's definitely a concern to keep in mind.
  The problem is that if someone doesn't use a password manager they're morenlikely to reuse weak ones.
  Using a password manager is a better path, as long as there is awareness on how to keep it secured.
  
  I use the same password for every site, but I put the name of the site at the end of the password.
  For example:
  NotmypassB3ta.
  NotmypassGoogle.
  NotnypassLemmy. Etc.
  I figure it might stop the most lazy of attacks.
  
  I can't wait till passkeys are predominant
- Only if you're using a third-party password manager, rather than something stored/managed locally.
  
  Is that hard to do? And how do you access it remotely from your phone for instance?
- I just use a password manager for my password managers password manager. 2fa on all of em. Takes me forever to login
  
  I dunno, doesn't sound like enough layers to me. We can go deeper
- The main argument to use password managers to prevent password leaks to all of your services (that you use with the same login/email). You can't trust any service to store your password securely, therefore you should use different ones everywhere.
  Using a password manager gives you the convenience of using one, strong password that's being used very securely, and mitigating risk of password leaks spreading further.
  If you abstract it that way, it by no means eliminates the risk of someone breaking into your database, but makes it harder and from a single entry point, instead of any service that uses your password.
  Plus many of those password managers give you an option to use YubiKey for additional security.
  Oh and also you won't ever need to press "forgot password" ever again due to the arbitrary requirements that your password doesn't pass, so you modify it slightly so it would.
- The greatest threat is password databases being leaked from the services you use. Not your phone or laptop. Physical access to a device is a pretty high security bar.
  If you don't let people make notes of passwords they use one crap memorable password for everything. Let them store it, and advise them to do it somewhere encrypted. Ta da! Password manager.
- Absolutely. LastPass and others have already had data breaches.
  
  you literally described the exact use case for password managers. in security, it's not about IF you get breached, it's WHEN and how to recover from it. this includes cloud password managers. you can hack all the data you want from these companies but any reputable password manager company will employ a Zero Trust model where your data is stored encrypted. they can completely upend the company and destroy their whole infrastructure, but they still can't do shit unless they have your master pass or a time machine.
  
  Others?

I've actually come up with a way to have a complex and unique password for each service which is also resilient againt forced password changes, doenst require a password manager, and if Im being tortured I still wont be able to tell them what it is because I dont know it unless Im at the login screen. If the service changes the layout of their login screen though, Im fucked.
- How? 😂
  
  It must be some sort of compression algorithm of the information presented at the log-in screen.

I came up with a formula for my passwords - as easy to remember as a single password and makes a unique login for every site feasible without a password manager. Can be updated as often as you like and all you gotta do is remember the latest version of the formula. At the very least, the hashes will be different and it'd take someone having more than two of my passwords to figure out the pattern.
I also use over 100 email aliases with my own domain name so that my most important accounts have a separate login that isn't a common domain that wouldn't be easy for someone to guess.
It would take a lot of concentrated effort for someone to get at any of my important accounts, and even my less important ones would be pretty difficult to get into even if multiple accounts are compromised, due to using a smaller pool of aliases under common domains for less important accounts.
Someone got into half a dozen of my accounts a few years ago and I finally started taking security seriously.

At this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely in your accounts?

Not really though. Once the password has been leaked, it needs to be cracked. And that usually doesn't happen when the password is strong enough.
Except the password wasn't hashed but then the company belongs to get sued to bankruptcy
- That's also assuming they used proper salts and a strong hashing algorithm.
  Also MITM and or phishing attacks are not super common but can also depreciate your common password very quickly.
  Always layered defense. If it's not 1 thing, it could be another.
  Unique passwords are just one facet on a multi-layered security defense.
  
  I think phishing is by far the most common way to get passwords.
  I saw a guy at work fall victim to one. Looks like it's from some customer he knows, links to document on Office365 or similar, enter username and password and swearing because it's "lost them".
  I went, "What URL is that?"
  He looked at his screen for a second. "Fuck."
  "How many passwords have you given it?"
  "My work ones and my bank ones."
  "Better change those then, hadn't you?"
  
  Yep. Once I hit the password recovery link for a website and they emailed me my old password to me in plain text.
- Since you can never now for sure how a company handles hashing, always assume the worst. You will fare better.
- That is a really bad take.
  The meme is expressing that a strong password is a lot worse when reused.
  Even if one agrees with your take, the meme is accurate.
  But your take is really bad because "it needs to be leaked and cracked" ignores so many alternative ways to steal passwords. Xxs keylogger, mitm, phishing... And some of these attacks are making it really difficult or unlikely to succeed. E.g. the chance of a phishing email for your bank or apple icloud is much more likely than a phishing email about e.g. your babyphone. Segregation of accounts is also important because obviously if you use the same password 30 times, then there are 30 places to leak your password and some might use md5.
  
  But a strong password doesn't help you with phishing attacks and such attacks. It really only protects you against database breaches and direct password Bruteforce.
  Reusing a password doesn't destroy the whole security aspect you get from a strong password like the meme implies. Just some of it.
  Of course you should both not reuse passwords and use strong passwords

This meme couldn't explain it better - a strong password crumbles like a cardboard castle when used across multiple sites. Nails the message to the T.

i use this on all sites:
3 lower case 3 uppercase 3 special chars and 3 numbers, (pseudo) randomly arranged, (pseudo) randomly generated.
- How do you keep track of your passwords, if you don't mind me asking? That's where I get stuck
  
  I'm sure I'll get shredded for this, but I keep my passwords in a notebook. Every once in a while I go through and change them all into other random nonsense and reorganize to keep it neat. I am a bit of a notebook fanatic and a have a whole shelf full of them. If someone ever broke into my house there's no way they're going through all of them to find anything like that. If the house burned down, maybe a bit of a problem, but as long as I have my phone I can get my email back, and between my phone and email I can get any of the important ones back as well.
  If I had corporate or government secrets and was the target of espionage I'd probably rethink, but the danger of anything is so minuscule.
  
  If you’re alright with an online password manager Bitwarden is the best one there is. If you prefer having an offline password manager KeePassXC is a great option as well :)
  
  A password manager. I personally use 1Password, I've seen a lot of recommendations for BitWarden, and my workplace uses KeePass.
  
  Derive the pseudorandom parts somehow from the url domain and you'll always be able to figure it out.

Same mail at a shady provider

Use a passphrase, so much better and more secure
- But that doesn't do anything to mitigate using the same password/phrase on multiple services.

Well once you get passkeys implemented in every website. Now they'll need to steal your phone. Haha.
- I get the joke.
  But related real talk phones get got a lot. They won't need to steal your phone they'll just hack it like every other computer on the planet.
  You don't have to look much for the evidence.
  https://www.pcmag.com/news/ileakage-flaw-can-prompt-apples-safari-to-expose-passwords-sensitive-data
  https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/samsung-galaxy-s23-hacked-twice-on-first-day-of-pwn2own-toronto/amp/

hey guys sort the comments by new for some free lemmy account passwords (joke)
- I clicked old by mistake and it actually worked!

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I just use engine model codes and body series# with special characters. Most of them are not even from the same vehicle so I doubt any one can remember. Shit sometimes I even forget what engine I coded with a certain vehicle. And then I get the you "can't used the same password" which was enter previously to login.

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