How are password storing systems so secure? I’m hesitant to put all of my passwords to everything in a single place, but they are widely regarded as safe. How come they are supposedly harder to hack than a password on an individual website?

Question

I’m really hesitant to use one because I feel like if someone gets access to it then my entire life would be exposed, but I’ve been told that’s essentially “impossible” and I’ve often seen them endorsed by computer security experts and people who know what they’re talking about.

In: Technology

Answer 1

> I’m really hesitant to use one because I feel like if someone gets access to it then my entire life would be exposed

This is true. As with most things in life, you have to make compromises, and in this case, you’re trading strong passwords everywhere else against a single point of failure protecting everything else.

Something like Lastpass, for example, helps you by operating on a zero-knowledge model: they do not and cannot know your master password. They don’t store it anywhere on their servers; all they store is the encrypted data. Sure, an attacker could breach Lastpass and get that data, but it wouldn’t do them any good without a way to decrypt it, and since Lastpass doesn’t store your master password and encrypts its data with industry-leading technology, it could take, and I swear to you this is a real result:

27 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years

for a single computer to break a single piece of Lastpass’ encrypted data.

Adding a thousand computers of similar spec….wouldn’t help much. Divide that number by a thousand, you still have trillions on trillions of years.

Use a strong master password, and you’ll be fine. Just make sure you don’t forget it, because a consequence of zero-knowledge is that Lastpass *cannot* help you if you forget it.