1password crack: How to hack the popular password manager for $100

John the Ripper, the pre-eminent password cracking tool, is getting ready to take on 1Password. Is 1Password ready? Yes! We have been ready for a long time, but you need to do your part by having a good Master Password.

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Let me stress again that the existence of a password cracking tool does not reflect any kind of weakness in the system it is attacking. When you have encrypted data, there is nothing stopping a person or a computer from trying to guess the password.

I also tested a data file with 28,000 PBKDF2 iterations. As expected John the Ripper was slowed down about 28 times from the case with 1000 PBKDF2 iterations. In the table I provide estimated cracking times if the data file uses 25000 PBKDF2 iterations, which should make JtR run about 25 times slower than when there are 1000 iterations. (Again, my timing data was a bit messier, but I am always rounding toward the worst case. That is, whenever there is some ambiguity or a range of results, I am always picking the estimates that would have John the Ripper be faster.)

And finally to read the table below, you need to be reminded of how I am measuring password strength. I can only calculate the strength of a password if I know the system by which the password was created. A great deal of advice floating around about creating passwords fails to take into account that the attackers know more about how people create passwords than the people creating the passwords, and these attackers can and do tune their cracking tools accordingly. Much of the common advice also fails to take into account that people are far more predictable than we imagine. So passwords that may look really strong are often far weaker than people imagine.

The cracking times are the average or mean time to crack. For example if it would take 116 years to try every possible 4 word password created with the diceware scheme, then it would take on average 58 years.

The short answer is that it costs the password cracker about $6 USD for every 2 (4.3 billion) guesses of a 1Password account password. An attacker, on average, only needs to try half of all the possible passwords, and had we not provided hints, it would have cost the attackers $4,300 USD to crack the three-word passwords in our challenge.

Because one attacker might dedicate two GPUs for 16 weeks working on a 40-bit password, while another might dedicate eight GPUs over four weeks, a better representation of the work an attacker has to do is to put it in terms of money. We designed the cracking contest to find out how much effort it would take (while there was still some time pressure for them to do it).

To answer your question: If someone were to get ahold of your vault in Dropbox they would still need to have your Master Password in order to decrypt your data. The Master Password is never sent to Dropbox by 1Password, so unless you've done something like store it in a file there it wouldn't be possible for the attacker to obtain this information from Dropbox. They'd either have to get it from you, or crack it. If you use a strong Master Password, cracking it is improbable.

Hi BenthanksI don't put my one time password in there of course so that's reassuringbut:' "If you use a strong Master Password, cracking it is improbable." doesn't sound REAL secure though.I hope it's better than improbablehave a good weekn

Ben, nice article that. Helpful.I followed it to this one [ -the-1password-master-password-follow-up/] which I found a bit hard to grasp though. My conclusion, a longish password is VERY hard to break. phew.

one more question, I see that a membership account works without dropbox, which is nice, as my old workhorse macbook is on OSX 10.6.8 (I have legacy SW I need to keep running) - it will stop syncing soon when dropbox support goes away. Not catastrophic as I carry my iPhone with 1password on it, but inconvenient if i need to use a lot of arcane passwords.

I understand the need to run legacy software, but at some point, it becomes incompatible with so much else that one is left with the choice of having an entire computer dedicated to a single piece or two of software, and unable to run other, equally necessary apps. You may still be able to get Chrome or Firefox to allow you to sign into your 1password.com account via a browser (and I'm not even sure about that; Chrome has discontinued support for 10.6, 7, and 8), but you won't be able to use 1Password 6 for Mac on your Snow Leopard Mac.

passware.com claims on their product page that they can recover the master password for 1Password (Passware Kit Forensic 2017 v1) here is the data sheet: _kit_forensic_datasheet.pdf.How can that be that there is a commercial tool which can easily crack my master password for 1Password?

Any encryption can be brute-forced given enough time and powerful enough hardware. However, if your Master Password is strong, you have nothing to worry about. They won't be able to crack it before the sun burns out.

"If you consider all possible 12-character passwords, there are something around 272 possibilities. It would take many millions of years to try them all. Indeed, it would take much longer," he writes. "But the people who crack human-created passwords don't do it that way. They set up their systems to try the most likely passwords first."

Over the past 48 hours, Internet security forums have buzzed with news about a newly discovered technique that allows crackers to make an impressive 3 million guesses per second when trying to find the passcode that unlocks the contents of the widely used 1Password password manager.

The optimization, devised by the developer of the oclHashcat-plus password cracking tool, achieved guessing speeds that were, depending on whom you are asking, from two to four times faster than expected. Its discovery was surprising, mainly because it relies in part on a subtle design flaw that until now has been overlooked.

Cryptographers disagree about whether the weakness resides in the popular cryptographic hash function folded into 1Password or the specific implementation contained in 1Password. Either way, the designers of 1Password are smart people who do cryptography right, so the flaw has turned heads. And while even a four-fold reduction in the time it takes to exhaust a cracking attack isn't earth-shattering, it's still significant, considering how many people use 1Password to store the keys to their digital kingdoms.

As many Ars readers know, it's never safe to store sensitive passwords in cleartext, or even in an encrypted format that can be mathematically converted back into plaintext. Enter the one-way cryptographic hash, a way of converting passwords, documents, or computer files into (theoretically) unique strings of text. As the description suggests, one-way hashes can't be reversed, so the only way to crack them is to run guesses through the same hash algorithm used in the first place. When the cracking output matches the intercepted hash, you've guessed the password. Crackers engage in the activity for fun and profit all the time.

Like all savvy developers whose software works with passwords, the AgileBits team has taken precautions to lower crackers' success. Chief among those measures is the use of the PBKDF2 hash function. This function allows developers to pass plaintext through SHA1, MD5, or any number of other hash algorithms hundreds or even thousands of times. That drives up the computing requirements needed to throw billions of guesses at a targeted hash and can literally add years or decades to the time it takes to arrive at the correct candidate. Functions such as scrypt and bcrypt do much the same thing.

Depending on the platform used to generate keychains, current versions of 1Password will pass the plaintext of a master password through 10,000 to about 45,000 iterations involving a randomization process known as HMAC, AgileBits "Chief Defender Against the Dark Arts" Jeffrey Goldberg told me. (Devices with lower processing speeds perform fewer iterations to prevent 1Password from requiring unacceptable amounts of time to unlock a keychain.) In a forum post published Tuesday, Hashcat developer Jens "atom" Steube said he was able to cut the number of repetitions required to crack passwords by a factor of four, allowing his PC running two AMD HD6990 graphics cards to throw 3 million guesses per second at a 1Password master password with 1,000 iterations. Since the password manager has been updated to require a minimum of 10,000 iterations, as Goldberg told me, cracking efforts presumably would increase proportionately.

Steube's technique is able to reduce the number of required repetitions by targeting the way PBKDF2 running in 1Password interacts with SHA1. When a user unlocks a keychain, each iteration actually calls the hash algorithm twice, once to generate a 128-bit AES key and again to generate what's known as an initialization vector of the same bit length. (Because SHA1 generates hashes of 160 bits, 1Password taps it twice to generate two 128-bit outputs, discarding what's left over.) What has surprised people over the past two days is the revelation that once the 128-bit AES key is discovered, crackers know immediately that they have arrived at the correct password guess. The Hashcat optimization works by running guesses through only the part that involves the AES key, effectively cutting in half the number of SHA1 calls needed to crack a master password.

"For the end users, it means that an attacker only needs to perform 50% of the SHA1 calls that the 1Password software needs (maybe only 25%, depending on how optimized the 1Password code is)," security consultant and software developer Adam Caudill wrote in a blog post published Tuesday. "When it comes to password cracking, that certainly seems less secure than what was intended. As flaws go, it could be far worse, but it's likely less secure than intended."

Thomas Ptacek, founder and principal at Matasano Security, is even more adamant that there's no meaningful security vulnerability. Yes, for legitimate users unlocking their 1Password keychain, each iteration calls the SHA1-version of HMAC twice, and this requirement doesn't extend to crackers who merely want to test whether a password guess is right. But it doesn't automatically follow that this arrangement is a defect, he argued. 2ff7e9595c