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27 June, 2025

Security Factors for a Main Vault (Password Manager)

There are 3 factors conventionally, PMI: Possession, Memorizing, Inherence, for authentication and encryption. Main vault is what to be accessed first and nothing before, vault is to access everything else. Here are the options for main vault 1st factor:
  • Possession: Can't be used for main vault, when you lose it, you lose access to everthing else
    • Physical passkey goes with inherence but eg. fingerprint can be cloned on silicon and can't change.
    • Physical passkey method needs extra passkey physical tokens for the case of losing main one.
    • Physical passkey can be lost all at once (eg.earthquake at home) and the vault is totally not accessible any more means all access lost
    • Even if you keep some passkeys at bank instead of at home, the inherence clone & can't change is still the problem
    • 2 factors down to 1:
    • When inherence is lost, the last point is only the passkey. If attack already cloned your inherence, and now is only the passkey. Even if you change to another key, it's just 1 factor to steal; and between the loss and until you realize you need to change passkey, all your data are already compromised.
  • Inherence: Can't be used for main vault, once it is copied, you can't change
    • Can go with possession (above) in pair but goes wrong (item above).
The only option for main vault is memorizing, although people want a passwordless future but memorizing things such as password, PIN, are still needed for now
  • Memorizing: The piece of info can't be lost, can't be copied if you don't give it out.
    • Can't be lost, even in the event of earthquake at home.
The memorized factors can be used on Android for encryption: PIN, password. Also Windows has password and PIN but less required about encryption on Windows 'cause your PC is usually on premise.

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