[Xylakant]

> * allowing pasting would undermine the idea that you should never write your password down, and lead to a proliferation of files called "passwords.txt" on everybody's desktops

"Never write a password down" has always been a bad idea. A file named "passwd.txt" on my desktop still is better than using a trivial password or the same password on all sites. It still requires compromise of my machine and prevents the password from being recovered from a dump of the pw-hashes.

[C14L]

And if your PC has full disk encryption and you lock your PC when afk, then its pretty close to a password manager.

[Xylakant]

No, there's a reason password managers should be preferred. For example, sometimes (browser) sandbox escapes grant reading of arbitrary files. Take for example the recently discussed malware scanner the sent the browsing history, it could read such a file and transfer it back.

[UncleMeat]

If you have malware on your device you lose already. It can just read memory out of your browser process and steal your passwords.

[thaumaturgy]

"Just".

Modern browsers and OS kernels have extensive mitigations against this. Reliably extracting a password from a browser process's heap would be newsworthy today.

[rileymat2]

I think “just” is apt. If you have a web request to send the password, you will have a url or username string very close by in memory that can be searched for.

[Xylakant]

I specifically picked an example of a malware that was capable of reading arbitrary files, but not arbitrary memory because the authors found a simple way to trick users into granting them this permission set, but not another.

A sandbox escape that allows the attacker to trick the browser into sending arbitrary files back is also substantially different to having malware on your system that can read arbitrary memory.

[ChrisSD]

Windows doesn't encrypt files on lock. You can tell this because your applications keep running...

[p4rsec]

But that's not the point. The point is they have to break past your login screen, or, failing that, pull data from your storage while it's "offline" (i.e. not booted). If it's encrypted, they can't pull data off your drive externally, and as long as they can't login you're fine. Plus all the data is stored still encrypted. It's not like it decrypts the drive when you boot, it just enables an decryption algorithm that decrypts data on the fly (AFAIK).

[Xylakant]

The data is encrypted, but as long as the encryption keys are in memory, they could be retrieved via either an attack against peripheral ports that can read memory (thunderbolt has proven vulnerable and USB too, iirc) or via a cold boot attack, possibly using freeze sprays. Such attacks against FDE have been demonstrated. A good password manager purges the keys after a bit or on lock. pass ties into the gpg ecosystem and thus allows having the keys on a smartcard, a capability I’d like to see in other PW-managers.

MacOS has the option to purge decryption keys from memory on lock, but that effectively puts the computer to sleep on lock. It’s more secure, but annoying as hell since all network connections die (VPN, ssh, ...)

[p4rsec]

True, there were a couple teams recently with proof of concept for a cold boot attack on BitLocker, so I guess it's still not so secure. But unless you've got some crazy blackhat or a three letter agency after you, I'd argue you're probably not at risk ;)

[temac]

If you have a fancy "USB" port which allows connexion of graphics cards (so basically a PCIe port, although it also accepts USB), chances are that you can do whatever you want with unrestricted DMA through this port. It seems that letting Windows use the IOMMU is only allowed on the Enterprise edition, which is basically unavailable for the general public. So facing determined and/or well financed actors, it is as if the Windows login do not exist anymore for tons of Windows users.