[AGKyle]

I think you may want to take a closer look at how 1Password works. I'll give a quick rundown here, but our security white paper goes into much greater detail: https://1pw.ca/whitepaper

Your data is encrypted locally on your devices, it is never available in a decrypted form on any of our servers. A compromise of our servers would result in the attacker getting gibberish (encrypted data).

To decrypt that data the attacker will need both your Master Password and your Secret Key. A Secret Key is a 128-bit key generated locally on your device, your Master Password is a passphrase set by you. These two keys are combined and, to simplify greatly, used to decrypt your data.

The only way an attacker is going to acquire your Master Password and Secret Key are from your devices. Those are the only places those keys really exist.

Guessing both the Secret Key and a strong Master Password are effectively going to cost such a significant amount of money, or due to time and processing constraints, be infeasible.

An attack would have to be highly targeted. In other words, you would have to be a specific target to make any attack be worthwhile. If you believe you are likely to be the target of such a very specific attack you probably have a team of security personnel working for you who could better advise you than I could.

I'd really suggest looking into how we do things. The only feasible attack on your data would be through your devices, and any other password manager that stores data locally on your devices will be impacted the same exact way in this case.

Hope that helps but if you have questions please let me know and I'll do my best to help get you answers.

Kyle

1Password Security Team

Edit: apparently markdown isn't a thing here.

[steveklabnik]

> Edit: apparently markdown isn't a thing here.

Extremely satisfied 1Password customer here. You're correct about lack of Markdown, and for the details: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

[AGKyle]

Hey thanks! I guess I've never had reason to use Markdown here until now and just discovered that after years of posting here.

Kyle

[vc8f6vVV]

While what you are saying seems technically sound it implies that you do everything right when generating Secret Key. Let's imagine you have a bug and it fills Secret Key with zeros (or some fixed sequence) and it becomes known after quite some time, and in between your server is compromised. How much easier it makes for an attacker to decrypt data en masse? I would assume some people may not like that such attack vector even exists.

[AGKyle]

We can talk all day about bugs and mistakes. They're a fact of life and we are human.

It's also important to remember that your Master Password still plays a role and YOU provide that. If you use a weak Master Password, and we somehow introduced a bug that set the Secret Key to 0's, then your Master Password would be the only thing protecting you. In an ideal world you'd continue to use a strong Master Password.

Kyle

1Password Security Team

[neor]

Thank you for your replies and giving a look into how 1Password handles security.

I've been looking to switch for a while now, as the UI of 1Password looks superior to LastPass and my wife needs a strong UI because else she won't understand her password manager :).

Few questions though; - Will you add support for the newer 2FA options anytime soon? I'd love to use a recent Yubikey when providing the second factor; the FIDO2 keys and NFC on iPhone. - Is there any roadmap on when the newer 1Password X becomes the default plugin for use in browsers? As a Linux user I believe my options to use 1Password are somewhat limited.

[AGKyle]

> Will you add support for the newer 2FA options anytime soon?

We've added Yubikey support for the web client and for 1Password for iOS.

We don't comment on future plans because they could change, but we would like to at least see feature parity here in all of the clients, but I can't comment on when that may happen.

2FA doesn't add the same level of security to 1Password as it may with other services so we need to be mindful of bordering into security theater.

> Is there any roadmap on when the newer 1Password X becomes the default plugin for use in browsers? As a Linux user I believe my options to use 1Password are somewhat limited.

I believe that's the direction we're heading but as I mentioned we don't generally comment on specifics. We've done the whole comment publicly and say "yes, it's coming soon" enough times and then had to backtrack and say "sorry, no can do" that we just don't say anything specific anymore for fear of upsetting users.

We always tell people buy for what the product is now, not what it may be in the future. And outlining future plans gets people to buy based on what it may be in the future, and those simply aren't promises we can always keep. So we do the typical under promise, over deliver when it comes to talking about future plans.

Hopefully this doesn't come across as pushing your questions off, that's not at all what I'm intending but clearer answers just aren't something we can comment on at this time.

If you do have any questions moving over though feel free to get in touch via our support page and I'll do my best to get you answers.

Kyle

1Password Security Team

[ohyeshedid]

"To decrypt that data the attacker will need both your Master Password and your Secret Key. A Secret Key is a 128-bit key generated locally on your device, your Master Password is a passphrase set by you. These two keys are combined and, to simplify greatly, used to decrypt your data."

I'm curious how syncing works, specifically in regards to the Secret Key. Seemingly, to me, if the process works as described; I'd need to copy that Secret Key to each device I want to sync, otherwise there'd be no way to decrypt the data on the new device.

What am I missing?

[AGKyle]

You are correct, you'd need to provide the key to each device.

To sign in on a new device you need:

1. Your email 2. Master Password 3. Secret Key 4. The URL for the server your data resides on

When signing in on a new device we offer a variety of ways to help you do this.

1. Your Emergency Kit, a PDF document, has a QR code that can be scanned on most clients. 2. There's also ways to show the same QR code, or a setup code, within the apps to scan on screen 3. For Apple products we do have a method that saves the Secret Key to the Keychain and can sync via iCloud to help facilitate adding the account to new devices 4. You can always do it manually as well

Hope that helps get a better idea of what has to be done there.

Kyle

1Password Security Team

[sjy]

Have a look at ‘Enrolling a new client’ in the white paper linked in the parent comment. The secret key is transmitted to the new device.

[YawningAngel]

Replying to this as I can't reply to the other child comment: The secret key is emailed given to you when you enroll and is used, frequently, every time you enroll a new device. 1Password would have to screw up catastrophically to just not use it.

Obviously they _could_ screw up catastrophically, but if you don't trust them to operate their service with a basic level of competence you probably shouldn't be using them as a password manager to begin with.

[vc8f6vVV]

The comment above says Secret Key is generated on my device, how can it be emailed anywhere? I don't quite understand how one can enroll other devices with local Secret Key, so I assume Secret Key has to leave my device and travel over the wire. Which raises even more questions, but even if it's not the way it's generated makes a big difference.

[AGKyle]

It is NOT emailed to you.

It is generated locally as I indicated, and as outlined in our white paper.

Where some users get confused, and perhaps rightfully, is that when you sign in you can generate a PDF called an Emergency Kit, that contains the Secret Key. This PDF is generated entirely in JS within the browser. It is not generated on our servers and then downloaded. Some users do get confused about that.

Our web client is effectively a client running in the browser, it's all local and communicates with our servers the same way that a native app would.

Kyle

1Password Security Team