WiFi sync with iOS: primary vault cannot be deselected

1P4Me

Hi.

I've so been looking forward to 5.1 and its promised WiFi sync capabilities. I created a secondary vault "iOS" and copied all items to it that I might need on the road.
But when I switched to the WiFi server settings pane in the settings I noticed that I cannot deselect the primary vault (which contains many items that must never be synced to any mobile device).

So does this mean that the primary vault will always be synced no matter what? How does this even make sense, especially in my case (and that's not a very exotic szenario but rather a very likely one)?

If the primary vault can be deselected or if I can prevent it from being synced to my iOS devices, please let me know how.

Thank you.

rickfillion

Hi @1P4Me,

Thanks for writing in. You're correct in stating that (currently) the primary vault will always be synced no matter what when syncing via Wi-Fi. The answer is mostly technical. All data synced via Wi-Fi is encrypted in two ways. One of those ways is that every item on your Mac gets decrypted using the secondary vault's key, then re-encrypted using the primary vault key. This way despite us syncing multiple vaults, we only need 1 set of shared keys (the ones for your primary profile). On the iOS side, we decrypt it, and re-encrypt it with the local key for that secondary vault.

We assumption is that with Wi-Fi sync there's a shared primary profile on both devices. We could, possibly, have a shared primary profile, but not sync the items. Would this solve your issue? In this scenario you'd still be required to have your primary profile on the iOS device marked as being synced via Wi-Fi with the Mac.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Rick

1P4Me

Hi.

Thanks for your answer. Ideally the secondary vault on my mac would be the primary one my iphone. But since that's seems unlikely according to what I read into your answer, I'll have to bother you with some more questions:

the assumption of a shared primary profile means you assume the owner of the mac and the iOS devices is the same, right? That makes sense.
So when you say, the keys for my primary vault (mac) are shared with my iOS devices, does that mean the password for my primary vault (mac) gets synced too? Could a stolen unlocked iphone possibly compromise the security of the 1P vaults on my mac?

If that is not the case, I still need to make sure that only items from the secondary vault are synced, nothing else. Syncing items from the primary vault and then deleting them automatically on the iOS device afterwards would be cheating. They shouldn't get there in the first place.

BTW why does WiFi syncing a secondary vault between my mac and my iOS devices seem more complicated than sharing a secondary between two people using Dropbox sync?

So, let's say your answer will erase all of my security concerns and doubts, is this solution possible right away or do I need to wait for an update (which one? Mac, iOS or both?).

I hope these questions were not too naïve but all I can do is to describe what I'd like to see as a user.

Thank you for your help.

rickfillion

Hi @1P4Me‌,

Your questions aren't naive at all. I love that you're questioning these things. :smile: You're right in stating that the assumption we make is that the owner of the Mac is the same as the iOS device for Wi-Fi sync. It's not designed with multi-user needs in mind, as opposed to say dropbox/agilekeychain sync.

If your iPhone gets stolen, and is unlocked, and 1Password is unlocked, and you've setup Wi-Fi sync with the Mac, the attacker/thief would possibly be able to find the AES keys for your Mac's primary vault based on the data that's in memory. This is no small task, but in theory it could be done.

You definitely don't want to sync your primary vaults with Wi-Fi then delete the items on iOS. This will cause them to be deleted on Mac as well.

I agree that Wi-Fi syncing and its relation to primary/secondary vaults is more complicated than simple Dropbox sync. This is part of the reason we split off Wi-Fi sync into its own tab under Preferences. We're trying to be clear that this is different.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's anything that's going to get you your desired solution right away. Depending on the solution we'd implement, it could require an update to both Mac and iOS.

Rick

Drew_AG

Hi @1P4Me,

To more specifically answer one of your questions:

So when you say, the keys for my primary vault (mac) are shared with my iOS devices, does that mean the password for my primary vault (mac) gets synced too?

No, your master password is not actually stored in your vault - in fact, it's not stored anywhere at all. And since it isn't stored anywhere, it isn't synced anywhere either. This is part of what makes 1Password so secure (and incidentally, it is also the reason why we can’t recover your master password for you if you ever forget it).

When creating a vault and choosing a master password, that password is used to encrypt a key, and that key encrypts the data in the vault. The key is synced, but not your master password. Therefore, as long as you haven't written down your master password anywhere, it exists only in your head, and nowhere else.

I hope this helps, but let us know if you have more questions.

1P4Me

Thank you for your answers. I thought some more about how to solve this. I have a little NAS here that offers a variety of protocols to connect to it (WebDAV, sFTP...). A friend recommended ownclowd which is some kind of private Dropbox he said. But in both cases I don't see how to sync a vault from there to my iOS devices. 1Password on iOS only offers iCloud, Dropbox & WiFi-Sync. Maybe it's time to think about supporting local NAS or solutions like owncloud.

As for right now, if I want to sync my mac's secondary vault with my iOS devices (and only that one), I can see no other solution than Dropbox.

Just to make sure I'm getting Dropbox sync right:

what @rickfillion‌ described above (primary profile, shared keys, keys for primary vault), none of that matters when I use Dropbox, right? And none of this gets synced to Dropbox / my iOS devices?

And then on my iOS devices I just point 1Password to the vault on Dropbox (the secondary one from my mac) which will be the only (and primary?) vault on my iOS device. Is that correct?

littlebobbytables

Hi @1P4Me‌

You're correct that at the moment Dropbox is the only way to sync just your secondary vault and no other with iOS. You are also correct that while there will be encryption keys stored in Dropbox they will only pertain to that secondary vault and only the Master Password for that secondary vault will decrypt the file. Anything else will be a massive screwup on our part given we've designed them to be shared. Lastly, yes you are correct that you if you start with a fresh copy of 1Password for iOS and use the Sync existing vault you can point it at the secondary vault and it will be considered the primary on your iOS device.

So yes to all three questions, you are correct :smile:

peskeguy

I would also appreciate the feature of syncing only secondary vaults via WiFi. It is by no means guaranteed that the Mac and iOS device user are the same or would want the same primary vaults, especially among families. You have mentioned there may be some technical limitations at the moment, but clearly the paradigm is already in place for Dropbox sync, how hard is it to do it the same way when syncing by Wifi?

That said, I am glad I can finally sync secondary vaults via Wifi at all. But I definitely assumed it would work the same way as Dropbox sync and was disappointed to discover that is not the case. Hopefully it's something you guys can seriously consider implementing.

rickfillion

Hi @peskeguy,

We'll make sure to add your vote to the concept of secondary vault only Wi-Fi syncing. I can't make any guarantees that we'll implement it, but it's definitely something that we'll keep in mind. There's a few technical challenges that would need to be overcome.

Rick