If 1Password folds, will people on the subscription plan be able to access/retrieve their passwords?
Yup:
If you use the 1Password apps, your data will always be cached locally on your devices, so you can view and edit it without an Internet connection. Any changes you make will become available on your other devices when you next go online.
(so it works if you don't have an internet connection because the power grid went down, or you traveled outside of service range, or AgileBits evaporated).
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If (and I'm not arguing there is one), but IF someone had an exploit to get into 1Password accounts, I'd guess it would be worth far more than $100K.
How? There's basically two types of l337 haxx0r: white hat and black hat. The black hat guys are generally the ones out for themselves (or people who pay them): they're the criminals you want to defend against (note: not always, but I'm speaking in generalities). The white hat guys are people with similar skill-sets, but who want to make the internet a safer place by pointing out vulnerabilities and disclosing them appropriately and securely, so they can be addressed/patched/fixed.
Black hat hackers might not bother trying to go after a $100,000 prize if they thought they could make more money by simply performing the hack for real and selling to the highest bidder...but the white hat hackers will. That's why entire companies like BugCrowd exist: to crowd-source well-intentioned hackers and give them a way to be compensated for their efforts and the benefit they provide. To my knowledge, $100,000 is the largest bounty any developer has ever offered via BugCrowd -- and no one's been able to claim it yet. Your mileage may vary, but that's reassuring to ME.
So let's assume you're talking about the actual bad guys, the black hats. There's two levels to this: could they break into 1Password's servers? And (since data on 1Password's servers is always encrypted): could they either crack AES-256 encryption or obtain the credentials to simply decrypt the data?
I'll leave the first one aside for now (could these l337 haxx0rs gain access to 1Password's servers), partly because I assume a company like AgileBits whose sole focus is security would competently manage their website, but mostly because all of the people predicting doom in this thread seem to be starting from the presumption that someone breaking into 1Password's servers is inevitable. I disagree, but let's say that's
already been done.
That leaves what your l337 haxx0rs would actually GET from such a hack. Namely: encrypted blobs. This is no different than what said l337 haxx0rs would get if they'd cracked either Dropbox or iCloud's servers and retrieved some 1Password vaults. 1Password has never depended for its cloud-sync security on the chops of whoever's running the sync service. The 1Password data is end-to-end encrypted.
So, encrypted blobs: your l337 haxx0r's got two choices there once they've got the actual encrypted data itself: either they HAVE the users' credentials already, or they'd need to acquire them somehow. Because 1Password never has users' encryption keys OR the means to acquire them (all de/encryption done locally, on users' devices), your l337 haxx0r's successful hack of 1Password's servers wouldn't also net them those credentials, so they'd need to go the second route, and acquire them.
Again: how? Mr(s) l337 haxx0r could try to socially engineer the account holders into telling them -- but that presumes they could tell which data is whose to begin with, so they could individually target those specific individuals. Time-consuming at best, even if they could tell who was who, and the users they targeted obligingly coughed up their Master Passwords. The hackers could try to crack AES-256 encryption itself, I suppose. I wish them best of luck with that. Other than that, though, if they don't have users' credentials and they acquire them from the users feasibly, they're going to have to brute-force the Master Password to decrypt the data. There are tools that will allow your l337 haxx0r to run "dictionary attacks" (essentially guessing every possible combination) very quickly...but 1Password uses
100,000 rounds of PBKDF2 to slow these attacks way down.
But wait! What if your grandmother's memory isn't what it used to be, and she uses a really, really bad Master Password for her 1Password account that those nefarious l337 haxx0rs have managed to take the encrypted data from? Won't that be easier to brute-force, even with all that PBKDF2, than a good Master Password? Some...but not enough to matter. Why not? Because 1Password uses something no other password manager that I'm aware of does: something called Two-Secret Key Derivation. Instead of just the user-determined Master Password (which might indeed be not the strongest choice, depending on user), the actual encryption key itself to decrypt your data is derived NOT just from that Master Password you chose when you created your account, but
also from a
second encryption factor: what AgileBits calls your
Secret Key. This is a randomly-generated string of upper-case numbers and digits that is equivalent to not less than 128 bits of entropy, making even the weakest Master Password
much stronger in practice.
In other words, if the AES-256 key used to encrypt your data is derived only from a Master Password of
PrettyFlower1, it's indeed pretty weak. But on
every 1Password account in existence (like mine and yours and everyone else's here who has one), that AES encryption key is derived from a combination of PrettyFlower1 PLUS a randomly-generated string that looks like: A3-NKXSTF-RXFHG-X47C5-45SZP-DHUF3-AWK0T. Have a look back at that chart about how long it would take, using a 4-GPU-enhanced hashcat setup (l337 haxx0r rig for brute-forcing passwords), to crack various keys with various bits of entropy. When you start getting into the trillions of years, I don't know about you, but I start feeling relatively safe.
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Are you actually serious? 100.000 dollars? You think any professional criminal hacker, would give that away for that low amount of money. That is hilarious. Hilarious!
Breaking into 1Password.com is worth millions of dollars if you sell it on the black market or to some government.
And there is a chance that (like in the case of the Yahoo hack) customers and the public would find out many years later.
Something is certainly hilarious in this thread, but it's not what you're imagining. What's becoming more and more amusing is people who in one breath will say that subscriptions are a money-grab or a particular piece of software is too expensive...and in the next breath suggest that l337 haxx0rs wouldn't and shouldn't get out of bed for $100K.
There are a great many white hat folks who would definitely be motivated by $100K -- unless it's your position that only the bad guys are any good at hacking. That would truly be hilarious...ly insulting to every security researcher out there who isn't an actual criminal.
