#DASHLANE SIGN IN UPDATE#

They told me the transmitted passwords вЂњare only used to update your new password there, and they are not stored anywhere on serversвЂќ, which is outright false since itвЂ™s stored in memory for 45 seconds to 5 minutes. The worst thing is how they continuously play with words. With the way they put things and the amount of technical jargon used, their replies could have easily fooled people who are not technologically inclined (the whole email thread is included at the end of this post). This was in the middle of a big smoke screen on how passwords are encrypted before being sent to the server (thank goodness) and that all passwords stored in Dashlane are only known by the user and never by Dashlane. Their first-level support basically told me itвЂ™s secure because вЂњinformation is removed from Random Access Memory right after our servers send the result back to the application, which is 45 seconds in average to change a password, or after five minutes if our servers cannot reach your application anymoreвЂќ. This led me to contact Dashlane to see how they intended to justify this. The best way for a service to guarantee the secrecy of data is to ensure they never have access to it in the first place. This is the exact opposite of security by design. This process uses a secure, dedicated server infrastructure, and the information is immediately removed once the process is complete.

Note that the Password Changer requires that your old and new passwords be briefly unencrypted on our servers. When using the Password Changer, your passwords are always generated locally by the Dashlane application, then encrypted and transmitted securely to our servers. They even mention this explicitly in their help pages on the Password Changer: You read that right: when using DashlaneвЂ™s Password Changer feature, both your old and your new password transit through DashlaneвЂ™s servers, where they will be in plain text at one point or another, since they need to be able to fill them on the website they are changing the password for. Password Changer uses our servers to actually connect to the sites in order to update your passwords there. This is why a site may detect that you are signing in from another location and display a warning. Their FAQ mentions the following (emphasis mine):ДЄ вЂњsuspicious log-in attemptвЂќ notification may appear when signing in to a site after using Password Changer, because your passwords are changed through our servers when using the Password Changer feature. Rather than doing everything locally on the userвЂ™s machine, which is what another password manager with this feature does, Dashlane does it via their servers. The main problematic feature is their Password Changer it may look awesome, but it represents a serious security issue. This is something that every Password Manager must guarantee.Дashlane's design choices make them unable to guarantee that they will never have access to their users' passwords.

The main principle Dashlane tramples is the minimisation of their attack surface, as their design choices make them unable to guarantee that they will never have access to their usersвЂ™ passwords without knowing their Master Passwords. The first feature does not respect basic security by design principles, to which any application or organisation should automatically adhere when handling sensitive data. Specifically, I take serious issue with two of DashlaneвЂ™s features, both in the way they are designed and in the way they are presented. However, while doing my research, I stumbled upon some concerning design choices regarding Dashlane, which pushed me to write and publish this post first. Initially, this post should have been a comparative of password managers. Hereunder the original post, for archival purposes. This post is therefore not relevant anymore, but IвЂ™d like to think it played a role in this change happening. December 2021 update: three years (!) after this post was published, Dashlane finally updated their Password Changer to make it work locally.

#DASHLANE SIGN IN UPDATE#

Dashlane sign in