Swiss researchers find password manager security gaps

A research team from the Swiss federal technology institute ETH Zurich has uncovered serious security flaws with password management systems. + Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox Anyone who regularly uses online services quickly has hundreds of passwords, wrote Samuel Schlaefli for ETH News on Monday. It is difficult to memorise them all. Millions of people therefore rely on the help of a password manager. All other passwords are stored behind a master password in a so-called vault. This simplifies access to sensitive data, such as bank accounts or online payment methods like credit cards. This makes password managers a likely target for hacker attacks, said Kenneth Paterson, computer science professor at ETH Zurich. Providers of password managers promise absolute security: the data is so well encrypted that even they have no access to it. Researchers at ETH Zurich have now been able to show that the encrypted data is not unreadable. "The promise is that ...