I’ve always hated the idea of using a subscription/cloud hosting for password management. I feel like I should have a LOT more control over that stuff and I don’t really want to hand all my keys over to a company.
All my secrets have been going in a highly encrypted archive with a long passphrase, but obviously that isn’t convenient on all devices. It’s been fine, I can open it on any computer but it’s not super quick. It does have the advantage of being able to put in multiple files, notes, private keys but it’s not ideal.
Anyway, finally found something that isn’t subscription, and has a similar philosophy - a highly encrypted archive file, and it’s open source and has heaps of clients including web browser plugins so it’s usable anywhere, and you can sync the vault with any file sync you like.
Thought you guys might appreciate the find, password managers have always been a bit of a catch 22 for me.
Note for android i found keepassxc the best app, and i’m using KeePassHelper browser plugin, and the KeePassXc desktop app as well as the free official one. Apps all seem to be cross platform.
I cannot stop reading it as keep ass
Girlfriend at the time noticed this on my phone and had some choice questions for me.
I personally prefer bitwarden, using a self-hosted vaultwarden. It’s free, it syncs, it’s easy to use.
I used to use keepassxc for years. Kept it synced with sync thing, though eventually work blocked networking with sync thing so I swapped to vaultwarden and never been happier.
Why sync your passwords from home with your work computer? Just keep them on your phone.
I could see it being tedious if you had to manually enter long, random string passwords regularly. Though I suppose you could change them to something easier to type. Ctrl+shift+L (bitwarden extension autofill shortcut) is just so much more convenient.
I recently made the switch to Vaultwarden when I read a series of articles making predictions about passkeys and how they are lining up to replace passwords. Bitwarden apparently is ready to implement whatever standard becomes most popular and I had FOMO of being left behind if I stuck with keepass only. Previously I was using various keepass compatible apps and then syncing the KDBX database with my Nextcloud. (Vaultwarden is the selfhosted fork of Bitwarden)
Vaultwarden isnt a fork because bitwarden isn’t selfhostable. Bitwarden has an official selfhosted version. Vaultwarden is a lightweight rust version of the backend. As the selfhosted version by bitwarden is quite fat. Vaultwarden uses the official webapp of the webvault in their fork.
I use KeePassXC on my laptop, KeePassDX on my phone and sync them with Syncthing.
This ia pretty sweet
Not bothered about the potential for keyloggers or even OS-level snooping on what is presumably your privacy-free Android device? Personally I would never type the master password into anything other than a computer running a FOSS stack that I control, but perhaps that is excessive caution.
Keepass clients typically have biometric input… and let’s not pretend you don’t need to type in your vaultwarden password in Android on the first run, either.
You could use a usb-c passkey but I know that’s not the majority use case.
I installed KeePass(XC) on Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, Mac, for Firefox and Chrome and it’s all synced via encrypted cloud share. It even has OTP functionality so you don’t have to manually type 2FA codes.
Yup, I have been using KeePassXC locally since (one of) the first big LastPass breaches. I thought “password manager company… they know encryption” and then kept some of the most important things stored in my vault including notes of Bitcoin seedphrases etc. Thought "even if they get hacked, they wouldn’t let anyone exfil the huge amount of data from the USER VAULT SERVER… thought “my passphrase is like 25-30 chars long, nobody will crack that”…
5 years after my last login and I find out the breach happened, user vaults were exfil’d, the encryption was absolute shit, and the notes weren’t even encrypted.
I don’t trust cloud companies to keep promises or know what they’re doing today. and anything self-hosted isnt Internet accessable unless it’s on dedicated hardware subnetted off and wouldn’t matter if it got hacked.
Bitwarden for example does public reports and is pretty cheap at 10€ per year. But the base (free) offering is more than enough. The fee is only to have TOTP and a bit of encrypted cloud storage. https://bitwarden.com/help/is-bitwarden-audited/
In theory at least, online services would be more safe than a locally decrypted vault. If your computer is compromised, the bad actors can pull your encrypted vault for an unlimited brute force attack. Of course, this can be mitigated by increasing the decryption time. However, if your vault is already decrypted, then bad actors can just pull all your password from your memory.
I, for one, am decrypting my vault once when I start my PC. In theory, if I were to use an online solution, bad actors wouldn’t be able to pull my vault from memory.
In theory, if I were to use an online solution, bad actors wouldn’t be able to pull my vault from memory.
It’s the same issue once you login to your vault via browser extension. They have to download your vault locally on login to decrypt it when you enter your password anyway*. Even if they don’t store your vault password in memory, they either store the entire vault (unlikely for size reasons) or a more temporary key to access the vault. Local compromise is full compromise already.
*If they don’t, then they either made a giant technological leap, or they’re storing your passwords on a simple database on their servers and that’s not what you want from a password manager.
