[pwg]

> Do we know if all password managers are written in such a way that they generate independent salts per password?

Because password managers must store __the password__ itself (in order to be able to submit it into login forms and the like) the use of a salt for each stored password would work against the aim of storing __the passwords__ themselves.

Instead, password managers store everything in encrypted form using a master key (password) for decrypting the encrypted data file. That master password should be passed through a key stretching function ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_stretching ) prior to use as the encryption key for the master encryption.

[lloeki]

How hard is it to get the master password when one knows 1. the encryption method 2. the encrypted password 3. the decrypted password ? (I don't have the foggiest idea about it, really)

[pwg]

> How hard is it to get the master password when one knows 1. the encryption method 2. the encrypted password 3. the decrypted password ? (I don't have the foggiest idea about it, really)

If your password manager encrypts each password separately, and stores that output separately, then that simplifies the task, because you can mount a known-plaintext attack and potentially reduce the complexity.

However, if your password manager stores things correctly, all the passwords are stored as a single "blob", with no known-plaintext anywhere in the blob, and the entire blob is fed through the encryption algorithm as a single block encryption using a single key.

For example, the password safe format ( http://passwordsafe.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/passwordsafe/... ) the master password is both salted and passed through a work-configurable key stretch function. The result of that operation is used to encrypt a 256bit random key using the Twofish algorithm. That 256bit random key is the actual encrypt key for all the password records, again using Twofish as the encryption algorithm.

So deriving the master password is made difficult by use of the key-stretch function, and deriving the actual 256bit random key is as difficult as otherwise breaking the Twofish algorithm.