The Emperor's New Password Manager
The Emperor’s New Password Manager: Security Analysis of Web-based Password Managers Zhiwei Li Warren He Devdatta Akhawe Dawn Song Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences University of California at Berkeley Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2014-138 http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-138.html July 7, 2014 Copyright © 2014, by the author(s). All rights reserved. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission. The Emperor’s New Password Manager: Security Analysis of Web-based Password Managers Zhiwei Li, Warren He, Devdatta Akhawe, Dawn Song University of California, Berkeley Abstract page, they also provide some protection against phish- We conduct a security analysis of five popular web-based ing attacks. Add cloud-based synchronization across de- password managers. Unlike “local” password managers, vices, and password managers promise tremendous se- web-based password managers run in the browser. We curity and usability benefits at minimal deployability identify four key security concerns for web-based pass- costs [10]. word managers and, for each, identify representative vul- Given these advantages, the popular media often ex- nerabilities through our case studies. Our attacks are se- tols the security advantages of modern password man- vere: in four out of the five password managers we stud- agers (e.g., CNET [11], PC Magazine [30], and New ied, an attacker can learn a user’s credentials for arbi- York Times [34]).
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