LastPass Leaking Passwords Via Chrome Extension
It’s a shame Passpack isn’t being updated actively as architecturally it seems like a much better product, the UI is shit though and it’s buggy for managing mass user accounts.
Password vault LastPass is scrambling to patch critical security flaws that malicious websites can exploit to steal millions of victims’ passphrases.
The programming cockups were spotted by Tavis Ormandy, a white-hat hacker on Google’s crack Project Zero security team. He found that the LastPass Chrome extension has an exploitable content script that evil webpages can attack to extract usernames and passwords.
LastPass works by storing your passwords in the cloud. It provides browser extensions that connect to your LastPass account and automatically fill out your saved login details when you surf to your favorite sites.
However, due to the discovered vulnerabilities, simply browsing a malicious website is enough to hand over all your LastPass passphrases to strangers. The weak LastPass script uncovered by Ormandy can be tricked into granting access to the manager’s internal mechanisms, which is rather bad news.
The script can also be abused to execute commands on the victim’s computer – Ormandy demonstrated this by running calc.exe simply by opening a webpage. A malicious website could exploit this hole to drop malware on a visiting machine. A victim must have the binary component of LastPass installed to be vulnerable to this attack.
This is a pretty major vulnerability for a company that is supposed to make your passwords MORE secure, not leak them to any malicious site that has also figured out the same stuff Tavis spotted.
After advocating password managers for a long time, this is not a good look.
The password manager developer has experience with Ormandy after he found another flaw in its code last year that could compromise a punter’s passwords just by visiting the wrong website.
“We greatly appreciate the work of the security community to challenge our product and uncover areas that need improvement,” Joe Siegrist, cofounder and VP of LastPass, told The Register.
“We have made our LastPass community aware of the report made by Tavis Ormandy and have confirmed that the vulnerabilities have been fixed. We were notified early on – our team worked directly with Tavis to verify the report made, and worked quickly to issue the fix. As always, we recommend that users keep their software updated to the latest versions.”
It appears LastPass’s fix for the Chrome extension issue was to quickly disable 1min-ui-prod.service.lastpass.com – although some say the server is still working for them, so they are still vulnerable. That LastPass backend system resolves to 23.72.215.179 for us right now, and is still up.
There’s also the flip-side that LastPass is a popular product so it’s more likely people are going to find flaws in it, more eyes on it and all that – and in the end, these discovered flaws make the product much more secure than smaller competitors that undergo less public scrutiny.
Or not, who knows.
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