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Lastpass Security Issue


From: Ryan Sears <rdsears () mtu edu>
Date: Thu, 5 May 2011 06:39:08 -0400 (EDT)

Hey all,

Early this morning the folks over at LastPass decided to issue a warning about a potential security issue based on the 
fact that they detected some anomalies in their logs. 

http://blog.lastpass.com/2011/05/lastpass-security-notification.html

Basically the post outlines the fact that even though they've investigated everything they can think of, they still 
noticed data potentially being exfiltrated from one of their DBs, as more information came out then was going in. 
Because of the fact they can't account for the traffic from any legitimate source, they're being paranoid and assuming 
the worst (that someone found a SQL injection presumably). 

Even though their passwords were all salted, they're still forcing everyone to change their master password. Those 
using 2-factor are relatively un-affected, although they have to change their master passwords as well. 

This might leave some people who use lastpass in 'Re-enable account hell', where they have their email password stored 
on lastpass, but can't verify and login to lastpass without clicking an activation link in their email. This can be 
solved by using one of the plugins in offline mode with your old master password. I'm not sure why they didn't mention 
it, but this has solved a lot of people's problems. 

All in all IMHO these guys take security quite seriously. They noticed an anomaly, investigated and hours later posted 
something about it on their blog. I'm not sure why no emails have been sent out, but there has been speculation that it 
would have taken too long 
(http://blog.lastpass.com/2011/05/lastpass-security-notification.html?showComment=1304571300013#c1232708813079521918), 
which I don't really agree with. That should've been their first step IMHO, and that's where they fell on their face a 
bit with all this.

They DO put impressive security measures into place when something does happen though, as seen in the XSS bug found. 
They implemented HSTS, X-Frame-Options, CSP, which I've only seen used in super rare cases:

http://blog.lastpass.com/2011/02/cross-site-scripting-vulnerability.html

They're also implementing PBKDF2, so that makes me feel as though with every security issue they're dealing with they 
don't just identify and re-mediate, but actually restructure their infrastructure in order to hedge against any 
potential future attack vectors. I personally see this as the best response of any company I've ever seen from a 
security standpoint.

Thoughts?

Ryan

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