Password managers or password reuse? This is the question faced by most consumers. Reusing a password or its minor variations for different accounts has never been a good idea, yet in today’s world of online everything the rate of password reuse reaches astonishing values. Using a password manager helps reduce password reuse, supposedly offering increased security. In this article, we’ll perform forensic analysis of some of the most common password managers.

We received some great feedback on the original article about attacking master passwords of several popular password managers. In one discussion, our benchmark numbers for 1Password were questioned. We had no choice but to re-run the benchmarks and publish an updated chart along with some technical details and explanations. We bring our apologies to AgileBits, the developers of 1Password, for letting the wrong number creep in to our benchmark. Can we still break into 1Password by attacking the master password? Please bear with us for up-to-date information and detailed technical discussion.

As you may already know from the official press release, we’ve recently updated Elcomsoft Phone Breaker to version 4.10. From that release, you could learn that the updated version of the tool targets passwords managers, adding the ability to instantly decrypt passwords stored in BlackBerry Password Keeper for BlackBerry 10 and attack 1Password containers.