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[-] TehBamski@lemmy.world 155 points 1 day ago

This seems like one picked up data packet away from being a bad idea. Am I overthinking this?

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 10 hours ago

This is probably ok. First of all, they're probably actually doing it in Javascript in the browser. It probably never travels over the network at all. And, if it did, with HTTPS it would be hard to intercept and decrypt except by a government or something.

But, it still gives me the willies to generate a password on a web page. Fundamentally a web browser is still a tool for sending and receiving data over the Internet, and that's not the kind of tool I'd want to be generating something that I don't want other people to know or see.

What happens if there's a bug? If the password is being generated in an app on my local system a badly designed app with a bug could maybe log my newly generated password in a local log file somewhere. If there's a bug in DuckDuckGo's javascript, who knows where that newly generated password might be logged?

[-] zergtoshi@lemmy.world 16 points 20 hours ago

With https as protocol, picked up data packets won't do much harm.
But relying on anything but a local password manager is imho still a bad idea.

[-] Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 1 day ago

Yeah I think I'll just click an icon in my password manager instead.

[-] Godort@lemmy.ca 79 points 1 day ago

This is probably fine. The connection to DDG will be over HTTPS, so a captured packet would need to be decoded first. And if someone were to manage to break the encryption, then they would also need to know what service you used the password for.

Ultimately, it's more secure to generate locally, but it would be a huge amount of work to get anything usable out of a packet capture

[-] warm@kbin.earth 19 points 1 day ago

Are they sending data? I'm pretty sure this will just be generated on the client.

[-] plz1@lemmy.world 47 points 1 day ago

Yeah, I tested it. It's not a client side thing, it is part of the search page output.

[-] warm@kbin.earth 3 points 13 hours ago
[-] TehBamski@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I'm no cybersecurity expert. But couldn't they just sniff your traffic to see where you (your packets) go and test the pw on each login for the last hour?

edit: I guess they are using DuckDuckGo, which has a higher level of privacy design and limits.

[-] kibiz0r@midwest.social 9 points 1 day ago

This is why you should do DNS over HTTPS

[-] nef@slrpnk.net 1 points 14 hours ago

DoH is good, but it wouldn't help much in this scenario. Even if every website you connected to supported Encrypted Client Hello, IP addresses greatly narrow down which domains you're connecting to.

But realistically using DDG to generate a password is safer than downloading a local program to do it, an attacker would have to break into DDG and MITM your internet. For a local program all they have to do is compromise the site you download it from, and maybe the developer's signing key if you check that.

[-] who@feddit.org 30 points 1 day ago

You are not overthinking it. Exploiting this would be a bit more complex than capturing a packet on the wire, but it is possible.

If you intend to use a passphrase for anything important, it's best to generate it locally.

[-] AceBonobo@lemmy.world 2 points 19 hours ago

If you have to use this, generate multiple passwords and mix them

[-] etchinghillside@reddthat.com 6 points 1 day ago

There are certainly better ideas.

this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
331 points (100.0% liked)

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