Master Password Changing

[quote name='Penelope Pitstop' timestamp='1284445437' post='11109']

By way of feedback, using the term "Master Password" to mean different things for different platforms is very confusing. May I suggest that new terms are developed to distinguish between them? Even though the various 1PW implementations can be used in a standalone way, I think of them collectively as an integrated system. I think the terminology and behaviour should therefore be as consistent as possible across the various platforms.[/quote]



Thanks Penelope. This is something that we have been thinking about, but one of the problems is that these things are difficult to change without adding additional confusion. Some of what you see is due to history. When we first introduced 1Password for iPhone, syncing was very limited. It is only recently that we really do have syncing across all platforms.



None-the-less, we do need to look at how we can explain things more clearly.



Just to give you some background, the data format used on iOS is different than the data format using in the 1Password.agilekeychain. The latter is very filesystem intensive and so it is appropriate for iOS. Also this gives us the ability to have different master passwords on an iPhone than on a computer with a full keyboard. My 1Password.agilekeychain master password is a pain to type on my iPhone, where instead I use a master password that is more appropriate for that keyboard.



[quote]

I changed the Master Password on my Mac but not on my Windows system. I'm surprised to find that I can create a new item on my Mac and can see it in my Windows system. Surely that can't be right?[/quote]



It looks like Dropbox hasn't synced your 1password.keys file. I'm not sure why.



Here's a little background to explain the security. All of your encrypted data is encrypted with a key. That key is a truly random 128-bit number which is picked when you first create your 1Password data file. The key itself never changes. But the key in turn is encrypted with your master password, and the encrypted key is stored in a file called 1Password.keys. When you give 1Password your master password, 1Password uses your master password to decrypt the key. It then holds on to the key for a while (depending on the timings you've set in preferences) and uses that key to decrypted specific items only as needed. This behind the scenes stuff improves security and efficiency in many ways, but I'll try to avoid the temptation to wander into a discussion of that.



When you change a master password (on Mac or Windows) 1Password re-encrypts the key with the new master password and writes that to 1Password.keys in your 1Password.agilekeychain file/folder.



So I would like to you do a couple of things to help figure out what is going on here. On your Mac, on your Windows system and also on the Dropbox website, I would like you to look at the file modify times of the files 1Password.keys and .1Password.keys, both of which live in 1Password.agilekeychain.



For the Mac side of things, it will be easiest to just send us a diagnostics report. Could you please email us your Diagnostics Report? This will help us track down the issue more quickly. You can generate the report from 1Password on you Mac by clicking the Help > Troubleshooting > Diagnostics Report... menu item and then email it to support@agile.ws. So that we can connect the dots, please also include a link to this discussion on the forums.



On Windows, use Windows Explorer to navigate to your 1Password.agilekeychain folder (which will be somewhere in your Dropbox folder) and go into the 1Password.agilekeychain\data\default folder and look for the modify times for files called 1Password.keys and .1Password.keys. Please send us those modify times (again linking to this discussion).



Finally, do the same thing on the Dropbox website. Log into your account and navigate into 1Password.agilekeychain > data > default and look for the modify times on the .1Password.keys file and the 1Password.keys file.



Once we see what Dropbox, Mac and Windows have to say about those file modification times, we can get a better understanding of why they didn't sync properly.



[quote]

I thought changing the Master Password on my Mac was supposed to protect my data yet I seem to be able to access it using the old Master Password on the Windows computer. That doesn't seem very secure to me. What's going on?

[/quote]



It looks like one or more of the keys files didn't sync properly. We will look into this when we see the various modify times. I hope the discussion above helps you better see what is going on.



Cheers,



-j