I’m going to move away from lastpass because the user experience is pretty fucking shit. I was going to look at 1pass as I use it a lot at work and so know it. However I have heard a lot of praise for BitWarden and VaultWarden on here and so probably going to try them out first.
My questions are to those of you who self-host, firstly: why?
And how do you mitigate the risk of your internet going down at home and blocking your access while away?
BitWarden’s paid tier is only $10 a year which I’m happy to pay to support a decent service, but im curious about the benefits of the above. I already run syncthing on a pi so adding a password manager wouldn’t need any additional hardware.
vaultwarden syncs your passwords locally so even if your server is down the passwords remain available on your device. And it is a wonderful password manager, you can share passwords with your family, have TOTPs, passkeys.
Accessing Vaultwarden through a VPN gives me peace of mind that it can’t be attacked.
Another great thing about Bitwarden is that it’s possible to export locally cached passwords to (encrypted) json/csv. This makes recovery possible even if all backups were gone.
Yes, Bitwarden browser plugins require TLS, so I use DNS challenge to get a cert without an open port 80/443.
The domain points to a local IP, so I can’t access it without the VPN.
Having everything behind a reverse proxy makes it much easier to know which services are open, and I only need to open port 80/443 on my servers firewall.
Hmm maybe I should move mine to my VPN. Currently I have it publicly accessible so I can access it from systems where I can’t run other VPNs for security reasons (work systems). I use a physical token with FIDO2 (Yubikey) for two factor authentication though, so I’m not too worried about unauthorized access.
Because they use the official apps/web-vault, they don’t need to implement most of the vault/encryption features, so at least the actual data should be fine.
Security audits are expensive, so I don’t expect it to happen, unless some sponsor pays for it.
They have processes for CVEs and it seems like there wasn’t any major security issues (altough I wouldn’t host a public instance for unknown users).
That’s a good point. I didn’t consider the fact that all the encryption is done client-side, so that’s the most important part to audit (which Bitwarden has already done).
I don’t, specifically because I don’t trust myself to host that. I know what people will say here, but I trust 1pass way more than I could do it myself.
1pass uses your password plus a secret key to generate your full “password”, meaning you need both to access your vault. The password you memorize, the key you keep safe somewhere (inside the vault is even good, since you probably have it open on another device should you need it). They publish their docs, and show how they encrypt your vaults. To them, your vaults are truly just random bytes they store in blob storage. They don’t store your key, they don’t store your password, they will not help you out if you lock yourself out. That’s the level of security I want for a password vault. If they ever get breached, which hey, it can happen, the most someone will get is a random blob of data, which then I’d go and probably generate a new password and reencrypt everything again anyway.
Vs me hosting myself, I’m sure the code is good - but I don’t trust myself to host that data. There’s too many points of failure. I could set up encryption wrong, I could expose a bad port, if someone gained access to my network I don’t trust that they wouldn’t find some way to access my vaults. It’s just too likely I have a bad config somewhere that would open everything up. Plus then it’s on me to upgrade immediately if there’s a zero day, something I’m more likely to miss.
I know, on the selfhosted community this is heresy, but this is the one thing I don’t self host, I leave it to true security researchers.
Yeah exactly. Passwords and OTPs are NOT the kind of thing you want to lose…
And while you obviously never want your data stolen, even LastPass they didn’t get any actual passwords. Much like 1Pass, Bitwarden or Proton Pass, none of which have had any breaches of any kind that I am aware of. Too many low-hanging fruit.
Another great point, if I lose my Linux isos, sucks but I’ll redownload. If I lose my family videos, sucks but I’ll log into my backups and resync. If I lose my credentials I’m fucked. Plain fucked. I can’t decrypt my backups, can’t log into services, it’s done.
There are somethings either worth paying someone else to host, or where you trust a 3rd party more than you’re own setup. I realize other users may feel different, but ultimately it’s a judgement call
BW has been a pretty great opensource company, and it’s worth my $10/yr for premium.
Wow, Bitwarden has made leaps and bounds on catching up to 1password on dev tools and enterprise features the last few years. I’m going to need to re-evaluate/consider moving over.
As a side note, if you work somewhere that uses 1password, you can usually get your personal subscription comped as an individual. Only need to pay for it if you leave your company or they drop 1password.
I dont know that I’ll stay on 1password forever, but on the scale of things I’m most concerned about self-hosting vs using a reasonably private SaaS, 1password is nowhere near the top of my list to ditch. Otherwise, its a solid recommendation for non-self hosters who want to make some progress.
if you work somewhere that uses 1password, you can usually get your personal subscription comped as an individual
Same with Keeper as far as I know (which is what we use at work).
I prefer security software to be open-source though, which is why I love Bitwarden. Even if you don’t self-host it, there’s still value in it being open-source.
If you self host bitwarden/vaultwarden, each client stores an encrypted copy of the database, so even if your server was completely destroyed, you’d still have access to all the accounts you’re saving in it.
I’m self-hosting a VaultWarden install, and I’m doing it because uh, well, at this point I’ve basically ended up hosting every service I use online at this point.
Though, for most people, there’s probably no real reason to self-host their own password manager, though please stop using Lastpass because they’ve shown that they’re utterly incompetent repeatedly at this point.
It was, IIRC, 3 separate breaches, plus a situation where the default KDF iterations on the vault was set to low as to actually make said encrypted data crackable.
The last I don’t really blame them for necessarily, but rather shows that they weren’t paying any attention to what their platform would actually protect against and what the threat landscape was and thus they never increased it and worse, when they did, they didn’t force older vaults to increase it because it would be mildly inconvenient to users.
Basically, just a poor showing of data stewardship and if there’s ONE thing you want your password manager to be good at, it’s that.
A cloud password manager is a database with your passwords hosted on a stranger’s computer. Why wouldn’t I be just as trustworthy as any other stranger on the internet?
There is no difference other than a shiny logo and a “contract” that promises you that the random stranger will take care. I promise that I will take care too.
If you still think there is a relevant difference, please tell me. To me, it looks like you don’t fully understand what a password manager stored on other people’s computers does.
Well they have an app for all the platforms i use, customer support, open sourced code, previous and existing customers that have experience and that recommend them freely, a track record of success, a verifiable business address, operations in a country whose legal system I recognise and offers me certain protections, the ability for me to pay using my preferred method of payment, and most important - not some willfully ignorant representative giving fallacious arguments against using a service.
I self host Bitwarden and it’s free to self host. You only have to pay for a license if you need multiple users or want to use their cloud services, I believe. My instance is 100% self hosted and completely isolated from the internet, and it works fine.
I self host it because I self host everything, but for credential managers I would never trust any 3rd party closed source utility or cloud service. Before I used a password manager I tracked them all manually with a text file and a TrueCrypt volume. I think giving unrelated credentials to 3rd parties is asking for trouble - they definitely don’t care as much about them as you do!
If you’re going to self host any credential manager, make sure you have an appropriate backup strategy, and make sure you have at least one client synced regularly so that you can still access passwords if the server itself dies for some reason.
You only have to pay for a license if you need multiple users or want to use their cloud services, I believe.
AFAIK you can have multiple users for free when self-hosting, and the features are essentially the same as the free hosted version. You need to pay if you want to get the premium features or share passwords across multiple users using an organization. Essentially the pricing is the same as the hosted version.
I’d recommend Vaultwarden for a small-scale self-hosted solution. It’s not Bitwarden, but it’s fully API-compatible so you can use all the Bitwarden clients and browser extensions. Self-hosted Bitwarden is quite a bit heavier than Vaultwarden since it’s designed for large-scale usage (like for an entire company of tens of thousands of people)
Lots of people like and recommend Bitwarden. I think followed by KeePass on second place.
I self-host stuff because I can, because I learn something while doing it and it gives me control. And I’m running that server anyways, so I might as well install one more service on it. If you don’t want to spend your time managing and maintaining servers and services, go for the official (paid) service. That’ll do, too.
If you’re worried about your internet connection going down, either use a VPS in a datacenter or just use software that syncs to your devices. I think Bitwarden does that, your passwords will be available without an internet connection to your server. They just won’t get synced until the server is reachable again.
Thanks, I did consider the syncing would be fine. But if the reason to do it is just hobbying then I’ll pass, I have too many hobbies at this point and managing what I’m already hosting is giving me enough of a scratch for that itch
I run vaultwarden in a docker container and I can’t say I’ve touched it since then. Its as much maintenance as all the other services I run. Reboot the server quarterly to make sure patches are applied. Docker containers patch nightly.
Sure. I think there are some areas where self-hosting is kinda mandatory because other solutions don’t fulfill my requirements. But I don’t think a password manager is part of that. It stores the passwords encrypted in the cloud anyways, $0-$10 a year isn’t much and I think Bitwarden has a good track record and you’ll be supporting them. Self-hosting is a nice hobby and I think integral part of a free and democratic culture on the internet. But it doesn’t have to be every tiny tool and everyone. Do it if you like, otherwise it’s fine if you support open source projects by paying a fair price if you want convenience and they offer a good hosted service.
Appreciate the input - that’s exactly where my heads at right now. Didn’t expect so many answers - really glad I asked, been very interesting reading different folks views on this.
Bitwarden’s free version is enough for my purposes, but I didn’t realize they had a $10/yr plan. That seems worth paying for, I’ll have to look into it.
Is there an easy way to export passwords from LastPass to another service, self-hosted or otherwise? I’ve been wanting to move away from my current manager but have been reluctant due to this.
Yes. It has been a while since I moved (whenever the first breach was), but I exported from lastpass and imported to Bitwarden with minimal issue, I think I had to add a column.
I evaluated both BitWarden and 1Password for work and 1Password generally won across the board.
If you host yourself make sure backups are rock solid and regularly monitored and tested. Have a plan for your infrastructure being down or compromised.
I can imagine the enterprise/business options are better than bitwarden but as an individual user I don’t need that and would only have the individual plan. It’s a little over twice the price of BitWarden and while every company I’ve worked at in recent years has had 1password i don’t see it mentioned on here anywhere near as often as BitWarden.
Bitwarden does external audits with reports and stores in zero knowledge storage.
Loose your master password and you are fucked. They can’t restore it even if you pay them a million €
That was basically the same claim LP made. Even if true, if you have a bad master password, you can be compromised. While yes, that’s on you, your data is a high priority target in a centralized password store… if you host it yourself, someone would first have to know you had that data to even target you for that. Much less exposure hosting it yourself. The convenience factor and potentially less security than a company hosting passwords have, so it’s kind of a six of one, half dozen of the other.
Fair points.
Considering bitwarden is zero knowledge the data in itself is for now ‘safe’ enough to me.
Though I could be subject to IP/vulnerability scans on my home connection or accidentaly forwarding stuff that puts the security at risk and getting compromised (Seriously…The stuff I could connect and control via VNC I found on shodan was very creepy and frightening).
Nah mate. Plus maintaining the data I already have is enough for me. Bitwarden would be way too much. But maybe in the future once I figure Linux and docker more out :)
I’m on the bandwagon of not hosting it myself. It really breaks down to a level of commitment & surface area issue for me.
Commitment: I know my server OS isn’t setup as well as it could be for mission critical software/uptime. I’m a hobbiest with limited time to spend on this hobby and I can’t spend 100hrs getting it all right.
Surface Area: I host a bunch of non mission critical services on one server and if I was hosting a password manager it would also be on that server. So I have a very large attack surface area and a weakness in one of those could result in all my passwords & more stored in the manager being exposed.
So I don’t trust my own OS to be fully secure and I don’t trust the other services and my configurations of them to be secure either. Given that any compromise of my password manager would be devastating. I let someone else host it.
I’ve seen that in the occassional cases when password managers have been compromised, the attacker only ends up with non encrypted user data & encrypted passwords. The encrypted passwords are practically unbreakable. The services also hire professionals who host and work in hosting for a living. And usually have better data siloing than I can afford.
All that to say I use bitwarden. It is an open source system which has plenty of security built into the model so even if compromised I don’t think my passwords are at risk. And I believe they are more well equipped to ensure that data is being managed well.
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vaultwarden syncs your passwords locally so even if your server is down the passwords remain available on your device. And it is a wonderful password manager, you can share passwords with your family, have TOTPs, passkeys.
Fully agreed.
Accessing Vaultwarden through a VPN gives me peace of mind that it can’t be attacked.
Another great thing about Bitwarden is that it’s possible to export locally cached passwords to (encrypted) json/csv. This makes recovery possible even if all backups were gone.
A VPN? you still need a reverse proxy/domain to use it don’t you?
You can forward a Wireguard port, exposing it to the internet.
Hmm, interesting, how would I start doing this?
I use a Synology NAS BTW, so it already gives me a Synology subdomain to mess around.
Yes, Bitwarden browser plugins require TLS, so I use DNS challenge to get a cert without an open port 80/443.
The domain points to a local IP, so I can’t access it without the VPN.
Having everything behind a reverse proxy makes it much easier to know which services are open, and I only need to open port 80/443 on my servers firewall.
DNS challenge? It is the 1st time I read about it.
I suppose in your LAN you need no VPNs then?
Yes.
Hmm maybe I should move mine to my VPN. Currently I have it publicly accessible so I can access it from systems where I can’t run other VPNs for security reasons (work systems). I use a physical token with FIDO2 (Yubikey) for two factor authentication though, so I’m not too worried about unauthorized access.
I have my Vaultwarden public so I can use it at work too, but my firewall blocks all external IPs except my work’s IP.
Vaultwarden is one of the few services I’d actually trust to be secure, so I wouldn’t worry if you update timely to new versions.
I hope it gets security audited one day, like Bitwarden was.
Because they use the official apps/web-vault, they don’t need to implement most of the vault/encryption features, so at least the actual data should be fine.
Security audits are expensive, so I don’t expect it to happen, unless some sponsor pays for it.
They have processes for CVEs and it seems like there wasn’t any major security issues (altough I wouldn’t host a public instance for unknown users).
That’s a good point. I didn’t consider the fact that all the encryption is done client-side, so that’s the most important part to audit (which Bitwarden has already done).
I access my Vaultwarden server via Cloudflared tunnel while I’m away from home network.
I don’t, specifically because I don’t trust myself to host that. I know what people will say here, but I trust 1pass way more than I could do it myself.
1pass uses your password plus a secret key to generate your full “password”, meaning you need both to access your vault. The password you memorize, the key you keep safe somewhere (inside the vault is even good, since you probably have it open on another device should you need it). They publish their docs, and show how they encrypt your vaults. To them, your vaults are truly just random bytes they store in blob storage. They don’t store your key, they don’t store your password, they will not help you out if you lock yourself out. That’s the level of security I want for a password vault. If they ever get breached, which hey, it can happen, the most someone will get is a random blob of data, which then I’d go and probably generate a new password and reencrypt everything again anyway.
Vs me hosting myself, I’m sure the code is good - but I don’t trust myself to host that data. There’s too many points of failure. I could set up encryption wrong, I could expose a bad port, if someone gained access to my network I don’t trust that they wouldn’t find some way to access my vaults. It’s just too likely I have a bad config somewhere that would open everything up. Plus then it’s on me to upgrade immediately if there’s a zero day, something I’m more likely to miss.
I know, on the selfhosted community this is heresy, but this is the one thing I don’t self host, I leave it to true security researchers.
Yeah exactly. Passwords and OTPs are NOT the kind of thing you want to lose…
And while you obviously never want your data stolen, even LastPass they didn’t get any actual passwords. Much like 1Pass, Bitwarden or Proton Pass, none of which have had any breaches of any kind that I am aware of. Too many low-hanging fruit.
Another great point, if I lose my Linux isos, sucks but I’ll redownload. If I lose my family videos, sucks but I’ll log into my backups and resync. If I lose my credentials I’m fucked. Plain fucked. I can’t decrypt my backups, can’t log into services, it’s done.
Thats why ones password DB should also be saved encrypted one one or two external drives.
Not everyone has a safety deposit box, or the ability to access a proper and secure off-site storage.
And if you’re just keeping those in your house, then fire, flood, and other incidents can destroy all copies at once.
Nah, I’m with you, except I use BitWarden.
There are somethings either worth paying someone else to host, or where you trust a 3rd party more than you’re own setup. I realize other users may feel different, but ultimately it’s a judgement call
BW has been a pretty great opensource company, and it’s worth my $10/yr for premium.
Wow, Bitwarden has made leaps and bounds on catching up to 1password on dev tools and enterprise features the last few years. I’m going to need to re-evaluate/consider moving over.
As a side note, if you work somewhere that uses 1password, you can usually get your personal subscription comped as an individual. Only need to pay for it if you leave your company or they drop 1password.
I dont know that I’ll stay on 1password forever, but on the scale of things I’m most concerned about self-hosting vs using a reasonably private SaaS, 1password is nowhere near the top of my list to ditch. Otherwise, its a solid recommendation for non-self hosters who want to make some progress.
Same with Keeper as far as I know (which is what we use at work).
I prefer security software to be open-source though, which is why I love Bitwarden. Even if you don’t self-host it, there’s still value in it being open-source.
If you self host bitwarden/vaultwarden, each client stores an encrypted copy of the database, so even if your server was completely destroyed, you’d still have access to all the accounts you’re saving in it.
I’m self-hosting a VaultWarden install, and I’m doing it because uh, well, at this point I’ve basically ended up hosting every service I use online at this point.
Though, for most people, there’s probably no real reason to self-host their own password manager, though please stop using Lastpass because they’ve shown that they’re utterly incompetent repeatedly at this point.
Just curious, how do you host it? Do you have it containerized or no?
Yeah, I run everything in containers, minus a couple of things like the nginx install that’s doing reverse proxy work.
Yeah I will likely move away.
My understanding with lastpass was that they had a breach but only encrypted data was stolen? What did I miss?
It was, IIRC, 3 separate breaches, plus a situation where the default KDF iterations on the vault was set to low as to actually make said encrypted data crackable.
The last I don’t really blame them for necessarily, but rather shows that they weren’t paying any attention to what their platform would actually protect against and what the threat landscape was and thus they never increased it and worse, when they did, they didn’t force older vaults to increase it because it would be mildly inconvenient to users.
Basically, just a poor showing of data stewardship and if there’s ONE thing you want your password manager to be good at, it’s that.
Yeah that tracks, tbh I had set mine higher so wasn’t an issue for me - but their UX, particularly on Android, is appalling.
Would you give me your password database? I promise to encrypt it!
No, because you’re not the supplier of a password manager.
A cloud password manager is a database with your passwords hosted on a stranger’s computer. Why wouldn’t I be just as trustworthy as any other stranger on the internet?
If you can’t see the difference for yourself, I won’t be able to show you.
There is no difference other than a shiny logo and a “contract” that promises you that the random stranger will take care. I promise that I will take care too.
If you still think there is a relevant difference, please tell me. To me, it looks like you don’t fully understand what a password manager stored on other people’s computers does.
Well they have an app for all the platforms i use, customer support, open sourced code, previous and existing customers that have experience and that recommend them freely, a track record of success, a verifiable business address, operations in a country whose legal system I recognise and offers me certain protections, the ability for me to pay using my preferred method of payment, and most important - not some willfully ignorant representative giving fallacious arguments against using a service.
If it was BitWarden where I can see the client side code … and there wasn’t a better option, quite possibly.
I give my ISP and many other places my BitWarden vault all the time and I just trust they’re not recording the traffic and trying to decrypt it.
I self host Bitwarden and it’s free to self host. You only have to pay for a license if you need multiple users or want to use their cloud services, I believe. My instance is 100% self hosted and completely isolated from the internet, and it works fine.
I self host it because I self host everything, but for credential managers I would never trust any 3rd party closed source utility or cloud service. Before I used a password manager I tracked them all manually with a text file and a TrueCrypt volume. I think giving unrelated credentials to 3rd parties is asking for trouble - they definitely don’t care as much about them as you do!
If you’re going to self host any credential manager, make sure you have an appropriate backup strategy, and make sure you have at least one client synced regularly so that you can still access passwords if the server itself dies for some reason.
Thanks that’s a helpful reply
AFAIK you can have multiple users for free when self-hosting, and the features are essentially the same as the free hosted version. You need to pay if you want to get the premium features or share passwords across multiple users using an organization. Essentially the pricing is the same as the hosted version.
I’d recommend Vaultwarden for a small-scale self-hosted solution. It’s not Bitwarden, but it’s fully API-compatible so you can use all the Bitwarden clients and browser extensions. Self-hosted Bitwarden is quite a bit heavier than Vaultwarden since it’s designed for large-scale usage (like for an entire company of tens of thousands of people)
Lots of people like and recommend Bitwarden. I think followed by KeePass on second place.
I self-host stuff because I can, because I learn something while doing it and it gives me control. And I’m running that server anyways, so I might as well install one more service on it. If you don’t want to spend your time managing and maintaining servers and services, go for the official (paid) service. That’ll do, too.
If you’re worried about your internet connection going down, either use a VPS in a datacenter or just use software that syncs to your devices. I think Bitwarden does that, your passwords will be available without an internet connection to your server. They just won’t get synced until the server is reachable again.
Thanks, I did consider the syncing would be fine. But if the reason to do it is just hobbying then I’ll pass, I have too many hobbies at this point and managing what I’m already hosting is giving me enough of a scratch for that itch
I run vaultwarden in a docker container and I can’t say I’ve touched it since then. Its as much maintenance as all the other services I run. Reboot the server quarterly to make sure patches are applied. Docker containers patch nightly.
Sure. I think there are some areas where self-hosting is kinda mandatory because other solutions don’t fulfill my requirements. But I don’t think a password manager is part of that. It stores the passwords encrypted in the cloud anyways, $0-$10 a year isn’t much and I think Bitwarden has a good track record and you’ll be supporting them. Self-hosting is a nice hobby and I think integral part of a free and democratic culture on the internet. But it doesn’t have to be every tiny tool and everyone. Do it if you like, otherwise it’s fine if you support open source projects by paying a fair price if you want convenience and they offer a good hosted service.
Appreciate the input - that’s exactly where my heads at right now. Didn’t expect so many answers - really glad I asked, been very interesting reading different folks views on this.
Bitwarden’s free version is enough for my purposes, but I didn’t realize they had a $10/yr plan. That seems worth paying for, I’ll have to look into it.
Is there an easy way to export passwords from LastPass to another service, self-hosted or otherwise? I’ve been wanting to move away from my current manager but have been reluctant due to this.
Yes. It has been a while since I moved (whenever the first breach was), but I exported from lastpass and imported to Bitwarden with minimal issue, I think I had to add a column.
Premium features for free. There are no benefits in relying on a third-party
Well ‘no benefits’ is a bit of a stretch.
Do you mean 2nd party? If not, what is the 3rd party in this situation?
If you do mean 2nd party - you should have a read through this thread, tonnes of benefit to buying these services.
I evaluated both BitWarden and 1Password for work and 1Password generally won across the board.
If you host yourself make sure backups are rock solid and regularly monitored and tested. Have a plan for your infrastructure being down or compromised.
Do you recall the rational for 1password?
I can imagine the enterprise/business options are better than bitwarden but as an individual user I don’t need that and would only have the individual plan. It’s a little over twice the price of BitWarden and while every company I’ve worked at in recent years has had 1password i don’t see it mentioned on here anywhere near as often as BitWarden.
I imagine BitWarden is sufficiently good. The big leap in security comes from having no password manager to a decent password manager.
LastPass does not seem as serious about security so it doesn’t meet my personal bar for decency.
I switched from Lastpass to 1Pass and it was pretty miserable. I then swtiched to Bitwarden. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than LP and 1Pass.
The reason you’d want to self-host is so that nobody has access to your data but you. “The cloud” is just someone elses computer"
Bitwarden does external audits with reports and stores in zero knowledge storage.
Loose your master password and you are fucked. They can’t restore it even if you pay them a million €
That was basically the same claim LP made. Even if true, if you have a bad master password, you can be compromised. While yes, that’s on you, your data is a high priority target in a centralized password store… if you host it yourself, someone would first have to know you had that data to even target you for that. Much less exposure hosting it yourself. The convenience factor and potentially less security than a company hosting passwords have, so it’s kind of a six of one, half dozen of the other.
Fair points.
Considering bitwarden is zero knowledge the data in itself is for now ‘safe’ enough to me.
Though I could be subject to IP/vulnerability scans on my home connection or accidentaly forwarding stuff that puts the security at risk and getting compromised (Seriously…The stuff I could connect and control via VNC I found on shodan was very creepy and frightening).
Nah mate. Plus maintaining the data I already have is enough for me. Bitwarden would be way too much. But maybe in the future once I figure Linux and docker more out :)
Im curious what makes it better than 1pass? Ive used a few of these, and my experience with 1pass was probably the best. Well, except for the price…
I’m on the bandwagon of not hosting it myself. It really breaks down to a level of commitment & surface area issue for me.
Commitment: I know my server OS isn’t setup as well as it could be for mission critical software/uptime. I’m a hobbiest with limited time to spend on this hobby and I can’t spend 100hrs getting it all right.
Surface Area: I host a bunch of non mission critical services on one server and if I was hosting a password manager it would also be on that server. So I have a very large attack surface area and a weakness in one of those could result in all my passwords & more stored in the manager being exposed.
So I don’t trust my own OS to be fully secure and I don’t trust the other services and my configurations of them to be secure either. Given that any compromise of my password manager would be devastating. I let someone else host it.
I’ve seen that in the occassional cases when password managers have been compromised, the attacker only ends up with non encrypted user data & encrypted passwords. The encrypted passwords are practically unbreakable. The services also hire professionals who host and work in hosting for a living. And usually have better data siloing than I can afford.
All that to say I use bitwarden. It is an open source system which has plenty of security built into the model so even if compromised I don’t think my passwords are at risk. And I believe they are more well equipped to ensure that data is being managed well.
you become fully in charge of your passwords instead of relying on someone else
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