Password Managers and Vault Application Security and Forensics: Research Challenges and Future Opportunities

Password manager and vault applications can be used by users to select strong passwords as well as storing user credentials locally or in the cloud. Such apps have been studied by various security researchers, for example in identifying potential vulnerabilities and bugs, as well as proposing techniques to forensically recover artifacts of interest/relevance to an investigation, which is also the focus of this paper. Specifically, we review the extant literature on the security and forensics of password manager and vault applications with the objective of identifying existing limitations and challenges.