Title: Horcrux: A Password Manager for Paranoids,
Abstract: Vulnerabilities in password managers are unremitting because current designs
provide large attack surfaces, both at the client and server. We describe and
evaluate Horcrux, a password manager that is designed holistically to minimize
and decentralize trust, while retaining the usability of a traditional password
manager. The prototype Horcrux client, implemented as a Firefox add-on, is
split into two components, with code that has access to the user's master's
password and any key material isolated into a small auditable component,
separate from the complexity of managing the user interface. Instead of
exposing actual credentials to the DOM, a dummy username and password are
autofilled by the untrusted component. The trusted component intercepts and
modifies POST requests before they are encrypted and sent over the network. To
avoid trusting a centralized store, stored credentials are secret-shared over
multiple servers. To provide domain and username privacy, while maintaining
resilience to off-line attacks on a compromised password store, we incorporate
cuckoo hashing in a way that ensures an attacker cannot determine if a guessed
master password is correct. Our approach only works for websites that do not
manipulate entered credentials in the browser client, so we conducted a
large-scale experiment that found the technique appears to be compatible with
over 98% of tested login forms.