I really wish I could restrict CLI access to 1Password per vault (or even per item).
When I briefly tried Kamal, it made me very uncomfortable for a script to ask for access to my entire 1Password - every login, credit card, etc. While I do not think Kamal is malicious, in the context of all the constant supply chain attacks, saying yes to anything like that seems extremely irresponsible.
This seems like an area where there'd be obvious value in applying the principle of least privilege, so I was surprised when I couldn't find any granularity to the CLI permissions in 1Password.
This is the takeaway from this disclosure. Everyone using op should create a service account and expose only the secrets that need access via the CLI. That greatly decreases the attack surface.
And makes it invisible if you’re compromised in a supply chain attack.
The flip side would be, you install your dependencies, and one tries to run `op …` and you get a 1Password popup on your screen, which should surprise you because you didn’t run `op` yet. Supply chain attack mitigated (maybe).
With a service account there is no prompt and your secrets, though now more limited in scope, and exfiltrated successfully and silently.
Service accounts are definitely not the silver bullet. 1Password should just add more fine-grained permissions and prompting options to get closer to an ideal solution.
CLI tools have weaker security models than their GUI counterparts bc the assumption is usually that if you have terminal access, you already have elevated privileges.
But in shared environments or CI/CD pipelines, this doesn’t work. And the credential exposure through process lists is pretty bad.
A service account sounds like one step forward, two steps back.
It can limit the scope of accessible vaults, which can help but only if you do the legwork of keeping multiple copies of secrets in separate vaults and managing service account tokens.
But the token is just in an environment variable, which if we’re worried about this supply chain malicious library scenario, is no different than keeping your secrets in a plain text .env file.
And worse, a service account doesn’t prompt the user.
The functionality of `op run —env-file .env — some_app` which then prompts the developer is what we’d want in a dev environment, just with finer grained permissions and options to prompt every time.
But realistically, if someone can execute code on your computer, they can get to your entire 1Password account through scraping the app, key logging, sending keystrokes and screenshotting, etc.
One thing that's very cool about 1Password is that they expose a lot of their more enterprisey features even on regular subs. I'm able to use 1Password for secret storage on my at-home k8s cluster without any kind of special business account.
This "vulnerability" is actually just a standard warning to not run untrusted software on your machine. In this case the attacker can leverage a commandline program to read your unlocked password vault, but without that he'd still be able to steal any user owned files on your machine and access your bank through your browser to steal your money.
"It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway."
Yes. It is a nice report that does not engage with 1password's security model at all. 1password specifically says that they do not think it is feasible to defend against locally executing malware.
“Not feasible” except that the author of the article provided a list of relatively low-effort solutions that 1Password could implement to improve the situation.
I’m pretty sure defending against locally executing malware is something that companies like Apple and Microsoft work on daily. The idea that it’s not “feasible” sounds suspiciously lazy.
Especially Apple works on that on the iPhone by scanning every new app and leave the customer only install that one that are signed by Apple itself. And they still fail with it.
Low-risk in terms of what? They’re superficially similar only in that both cache authentication for convenience. But the consequences are totally different. Sudo caches auth to let you run privileged commands locally; it doesn’t hand secrets to other processes. An unlocked 1Password CLI session can be abused by any code that can call the CLI (or read its session token) to export and ship vault contents, that’s an exfiltration vector, not just local privilege reuse. I’d rate that much higher risk personally.
the chance the dependency you've just updated and your vault being unlocked at the same exact time, if someone is attacked by a malicious dependency you have bigger problems to worry about.
To an extent, in that once you've unlocked your vault you now have access to it without having to type a password every time (convenience). Of course, the implications of this are far worse, in that you've now sent me (the hacker) all credentials in your vault. I'd say this has less to do with a password manager and more to do with using MFA so that the credentials alone are worthless.
Sidenote, but nice to see a few more Codeberg links popping up instead of the ubiquitous GitHub. Maybe we’re decentralising a little more in this area.
> This investigation took a while, and I waited a while before publishing this disclosure (life circumstances and giving 1Password time to fix the issue).
Sounds like the person really came from a supportive place and hoped things would get sorted out. And had life intervene along the way maybe.
If someone has arbitrary code execution on your machine as your user, then of course they can access things your user can access.
They could just as easily keylog your password, or replace the onepassword-cli binary with one that exfiltrates data, or steal your browser cookie to get into your email account and use that to hijack recovery flows...
To limit the attack surface here, maybe follow the permissions model on macOS, access a credential = TouchID/Password each time, just limiting dependencies, still leaves a large attack surface of accessing everything if an attacker is able to find a route through, that’s what they’re looking for is everything right there, somehow some way.
When I execute code on your machine, you are lost. Simply like that.
Don't store important passwords on your machine in a single point of failure. It's safer to store them unencrypted in a wrong named textfile than on the place where everyone will look automacially at first.
But more secury is it to NOT store them at all on your machine.
I’m surprised the CLI doesn’t asked permission for each program trying to access it, when using their SSH agent I get a popup for any program (then it unlock that key for that program until session ends).
People dismissing this vulnerability miss the point of a password manager which is to protect in such scenario where code gets executed on a machine but at least the data is encrypted, of course in that scenario the attacker can get access to the plain text env variables anyway that the developers has on their machine but at least it is not ALL of your credentials like in this case.
Service Account can limit the blast radius BUT you’ll end up saving that API token in your env anyway giving access to anyone executing malicious code…
Using their CLI is dangerous if they haven’t done anything to protect in this scenario. Did they have any comments in that vulnerability and how they want to mitigate it?
Why not simply return the value of the requested items and that’s it? Why unlock everything in a CLI scenario, surely the most common case is simply grabbing a single item like a .env for a project and that’s it.
I believe the CLI _does_ ask permission for each program trying to access it. The author's example includes a malicious vscode extension abusing the fact that he intentionally granted vscode permission to access the vault for one purpose and then a malicious extension leveraged that access to retrieve information through the op cli.
Oh wow, my bad. I saw 2024 as the disclosure and thought, well obviously 1Password have fixed that by now. Huh. Unflagged.
So, as someone who literally last month moved all of his .env in to 1Password and was feeling pretty, pretty smart about it: what now?
(Did that, by the way, on the advice of a comment here in response to the previous npm hack, whatever that was, where that commenter said 'you're a fool if you don't have your keys in a password manager' and so on and so forth. Security is hard?)
Put the secrets in their own vault, use a service account to access them and then follow the same rules as sudo's grace period - dedicated terminal session, run only the commands that need to be privileged and exit the session as soon as you don't need it any more
1Password used to be good 10 years ago, but not anymore. A couple of days ago, there was a post about Electron based apps that slow down macOS Tahoe (due to older versions of Electron using an undocumented API). When I ran the script on my laptop, 1Password was on the top of the list.
> 1Password.app: Electron 37.3.1 (Contents/Frameworks/Electron Framework.framework/Versions/A/Electron Framework)
Edit: Judging by the downvotes, it looks like there are a lot of electron lovers here. Why the hate for more efficient native apps? Are bloated binaries, janky UI and lower battery life, features? :)
1Password used to ship native (aka "Mac-assed") apps. They (relatively, in the software's history) recently switched to Electron instead of continuing native app development.
So again, how does an Electron bug become 1Password's fault?
It's cross-platform and integrates with browsers so it makes sense they would want to use a cross-platform JavaScript solution as much as possible. Not just to make their developers more efficient, but to reduce the surface area for bugs and vulnerabilities.
Personally, I use it as much for other secrets as for browser passwords. Social security numbers, software licenses (not so much anymore), password reset questions, passwords I can't paste (for work), etc.
I don't use a plugin. Never tried it, simply never mattered enough (and I generally store frequently-used browser passwords in the browser's keychain as well).
Genuinely curious: why would you pay for 1Password but then use your browser's password manager? Now you have to keep track of updating passwords in two places? Or remembering which sites are stored in which password manager? That's breaking my brain.
I guess you're being downvoted because you've just now realized that 1password is electron-based and you're using that discovery it to retro-actively confirm your pre-existing bias that electron = bad.
If electron was actually always bad, you wouldn't need a script to scan your machine and tell you which apps to hate, you'd just know "yep that's slop" upon first opening the app. Yet that is not the case. Because electron is a tool, and it's sometimes used so well that you don't even notice it until you run a script.
When I briefly tried Kamal, it made me very uncomfortable for a script to ask for access to my entire 1Password - every login, credit card, etc. While I do not think Kamal is malicious, in the context of all the constant supply chain attacks, saying yes to anything like that seems extremely irresponsible.
This seems like an area where there'd be obvious value in applying the principle of least privilege, so I was surprised when I couldn't find any granularity to the CLI permissions in 1Password.