Privacy

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How you all prevent Password/OTP/TOTP deadlocks? (programming.dev)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have read quite a few posts about preventing account password takeover from various malicious ways, and many OPSEC measures are there to prevent it from happening.

Consider a case where you face a total blackout or technical failure. Now, you need to log in to your password manager, which requires either OTP on email or TOTP. You don't have access to the TOTP app because the backup is stored in cloud storage, whose email login also requires OTP.

How would you prevent such from happening?I haven't found a satisfactory solution or explanation for that yet.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Backup codes. You're supposed to print them out and put it in a fire safe or something. They're longer and not time based and valid until you rotate them. With those you can lose everything and still access your accounts.

My KeePass database is also synchronized locally on most of my devices, so even if my server is dead I'm not really locked out, I just have annoying merge conflicts to resolve.

Also, Yubikeys. They're nice. If whatever blackout destroys your Yubikey, you have much worse problems to worry about than checking your email.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

If you're referring to keepass database merge conflicts, I use Syncthing and get these occasionally too, but KeepassDX for android can sometimes notice it and ask you if you want to merge them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Yeah similar setup except I use NextCloud.

KeepassDX is great, can use it with just about anything too. I used it over sftp for a bit. It'll happily do Google Drive, OneDrive, DropBox and just about anything that implements the right content providers.

Going through the provider is nice, it gives NextCloud an opportunity to sync it before it hands it over to KeepassXC, and knows when it gets saved too so it can sync it immediately. I don't think I've had merge conflicts since, and I still have my offline copy just in case.

The annoying part is when you've added a password on one side and cleaned up a bunch of passwords on the other side. When they get merged, it doesn't merge what changed it merges the databases together so your cleanup is gone. It's safe at least, and exceedingly rare.