Notices by Soren Stoutner (privacybrowser@fosstodon.org)

@lanodan So, use bookmarks to access sites where you already have accounts and type the URL yourself for new sites where you want to create accounts. None of that needs password manager integration and all the potential security and privacy pitfalls that entails.

@lanodan How exactly would you recommend going to a new website, creating an account, and typing in the password without some version of typing the URL for the website where you want to create an account? I fail to see how any password manager is going to do this for you.

@lanodan 😂 We are just going to have to agree to disagree. Personally, any programmatic integration of a password manager into the web browser is a much more likely vector of attack and one that I am unable to recommend to anyone.

@lanodan If you are typing a password into a website, it better be because you typed the URL or loaded it from your own bookmark.

If you go back to the original article, it was about someone downloading a compromised version of KeePass from an invalid website (ironic in the context of a discussion of password managers). KeePass is what I use myself, but I don't tend to find their website through a Google ad before initiating the download.

@lanodan
3. Put that password in your password manager. If you use the site frequently, you will not need to reference the password manager frequently. But, if for some reason you forget, you can open the password manager and remind yourself.

4. Because you can type this password easily, you don't need to use copy/paste (which can be compromised) or an integration with the browser (which can be compromised) to input it. You can just type it.

@lanodan Secure passwords look like this:

1. Length is far more important for entropy than characters that are hard to remember or type. Think https://xkcd.com/936/

2. Choose passwords that are unique and that you can easily remember. For example, if you think Microsoft or Google or Apple is the great evil, then your password for that site might be the following, including the spaces and punctuation.

Google is the great evil.

@lanodan That is a good distinction, but even integrated is too much of a security compromise for me to be able to recommend it to anyone.

@lanodan I have to disagree with you on the password manager. Everyone should use an offline password manager that does not sync to some cloud service, but for security and privacy reasons, nobody should use a password manager that integrates with their web browser.

You never want something that is processing untrusted data inputs (a web browser) having any connection path to the data store that holds your passwords.

@lanodan “This function provides protection against IDN homograph attacks, so **in some cases** the host part of the returned URI may be in Punycode if the safety check fails.”

Do you know which are the cases where it displays the punycode and which are the cases where it doesn’t?

@lanodan I think it has a lot more to do with the GUI code than the rendering engine code. In my testing, Chrome and Firefox for Android do not display the correct URL. Lightning behaves correctly the same as Privacy Browser Android. FOSS Browser and Fulguris (a fork of Lightning) change the URL, but they cover it up with the website title, so you can't see it unless you tap to edit it.

A reminder that browsers should never try to simplify or hide the URL from the user.

That's a feature that should be coming to Privacy Browser PC soon.

https://redmine.stoutner.com/issues/1108

“There’s no surefire way to detect either malicious Google ads or punycode-encoded URLs. Posting https://ķeepass.info into all five major browsers leads to the imposter site.”

Ah, yes. But, using Privacy Browser Android, the true punycode URL of https://xn--eepass-vbb.info/ is revealed.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/10/google-hosted-malvertising-leads-to-fake-keepass-site-that-looks-genuine/

@bobjonkman This is my personal favorite.

Stealing passwords from infosec Mastodon - without bypassing CSP | PortSwigger Research – https://portswigger.net/research/stealing-passwords-from-infosec-mastodon-without-bypassing-csp

“My next test was with Chrome autofill - would the password get filled in automatically by Chrome? Of course it would, and without any user interaction!”

This is one of the reasons why your password manager should never be integrated with your browser.

Cloudflare wants to replace CAPTCHAs with Turnstile – https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/28/cloudflare-wants-to-replace-captchas-with-turnstile/

“Turnstile automatically chooses a browser challenge based on ‘telemetry and client behavior exhibited during a session,’ Cloudflare says, rather than factors like login cookies. After running non-interactive JavaScript challenges to gather signals about the visitor and browser environment and using AI models to detect features and visitors who’ve passed a challenge before. . . .”