It’s 2023, why are websites actively preventing pasting into fields like passwords and credit card number boxes? I use a password manager for security, it’s recommended by my employer to use one, and it even avoids human error like accidentally fat-fingering keys, and best of all with the credit card number I don’t have to memorize anything or know a single digit/character!
I have to use the Don’t Fuck With Paste addon just to be able to paste my secrets into certain monthly billing websites; why is my electric provider and one of my banks so asinine that pasting cannot be allowed? I can only imagine downsides and zero upsides to this toxic dark-pattern behavior.
There is even a mention about this in NIST SP 800-63B, a standard for identity management that some companies must follow in the USA, which mentions forcefully rotating passwords and denying “password paste-in” as antiquated/bad advice:
Verifiers SHOULD permit claimants to use “paste” functionality when entering a memorized secret. This facilitates the use of password managers, which are widely used and in many cases increase the likelihood that users will choose stronger memorized secrets
Edit: I discovered that for Firefox users there’s a simpler way than exposing your secrets to someone’s third-party addon. Simply open about:config, search for dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled, and change it from true to false.
Edit 2: As some have pointed out, that config value interferes with regular functionality on some sites. Probably best to leave it alone unless you know what you’re doing.
If you assume malware is installed on a computer, typing a password using a keyboard is not safe either…
Keyloggers require hooking the keyboard driver, which although isn’t extremely complicated in it of itself, still somewhere along the way has to get past User Account Control to install.
The clipboard is free and open access to any and all programs though, foreground, background, whatever. It doesn’t require someone to click Paste to access the clipboard, a background program can very easily silently query the contents of the clipboard.
TL;DR - Clipboard is quite a bit easier to access than keystrokes from the keyboard driver. It’s like the last place I’d wanna put my sensitive info.
That’s just BS. Keyloggers only need to a simple win api call (SetWindowsHookEx with WH_KEYBOARD_LL) and you are good to go. No admin rights required. You won’t get events from elevated processes, but browsers run in regular userspace so you can capture everything.
So you mean Windows Defender and UAC still don’t flag that as suspicious and require admin privileges?
Well damn, all the more reason I switched to Linux in 2015. Today I learned.
It’s not only windows. Similar things are possible on many Linux distros.