Is there a way for my clients to submit usernames/passwords to my vaults?
Hi there, we are on Teams and have many clients we work with who need to provide us their various login details. Our clients find it difficult to create a 1P guest account. There is additional friction as I need to "confirm" each new guest, confusing the clients further. when they are greeted to an empty account.
It would be ideal if there was a secure way that clients could submit/enter their details securely into a vault without the need to learn a new interface, such as a simple 3-field form or similar. I understand there might be security implications, but is there any solution to this problem?
1Password Version: Latest
Extension Version: Latest
OS Version: Mac
Sync Type: Teams
Comments
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@henkisdabro: It's definitely something we'd all like a solution to. The problem is that what you see as the "friction" of adding and confirming a team member is the process which creates and exchanges encryption keys, similar to public key cryptography, so that data can be exchanged securely. The alternative, unfortunately, is PGP or similar, and generating and exchanging encryption keys manually. Without end-to-end encryption, exchanging data will not be secure; yet without exchanging keys, the data will be secure but unreadable to the other party. We do go to a lot of trouble to not only hide this complexity from users, but also streamline the process. But we cannot streamline away the key exchange, since without it we're all either sending data insecurely or sending secure data that's useless to the recipient. There just isn't a way around that. We do, however, want to make onboarding easier — perhaps by allowing admins to designate vaults for new, unconfirmed users upfront, so there's less of a "nothing to see here" shock when the user is confirmed. If we can do that, would that help? Be sure to let us know if you have any other suggestions! :)
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That onboarding improvement would really help. Preselecting vaults for new users.
However, we have many clients that are 'unsavvy', and the whole ordeal of haveing them creating user accounts really is a deal breaker, which in return results with clients sending all their passwords over email instead. So in the big picture, a "semi-secure" submission system is actually better than the consequence of not having one at all.
Thoughts?
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Thanks for the feedback. We appreciate you taking the time to share your use case with us.
Given how security oriented we are as a company, and 1Password is as a service, I'm not sure adding a "semi-secure" way to add credentials to a vault is something we'd be in a position to do. We can certainly take it into consideration for the future. I understand your position that they're going to act insecurely anyway (e.x. emailing passwords), and so this would be "better than nothing." I think the ultimate answer here is to make the process of being secure as painless as possible, instead of watering down security.
Hopefully at a minimum we can implement the onboarding improvements discussed to make this less troublesome.
Ben
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Though I am operating without some details regarding the key exchange process for Teams, I'm not sure the feature is completely untenable. An encrypted guest upload feature would rely on the guest generating a data encryption key, e.g., in a browser implementing appropriate cryptographic functionality, and encrypting this under the public key of the registered user. New entries would be submitted to the registered user's vault along with an encrypted (though not signed) key. This is a one-way workflow, i.e., the unauthenticated guest would not be able to access anything but a secure upload form.
If you want something a bit more secure, I think there's room to create a "soft" registration process for guests. What I mean by this is that you don't require them to take additional action to create an account once they access the invitation link. Present them the option to complete the process by setting a master password in order to obtain read-write access to the shared vault. Otherwise, allow them to access in "guest mode" and upload new credentials using a basic password-less authentication workflow.
If done correctly, I think this workflow could simplify guest sharing a good bit without necessarily watering security. And for this use case, I'd call this a net gain.
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Definitely some things to consider. Thanks for the feedback! :)
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No problem! Thanks for taking the time to read through these posts.
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Likewise, thanks for sharing your thoughts on this! It's certainly something that would be useful to some folks. :chuffed:
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