We watched a show where there was a concept called a Dead man's switch, and my wife asked me if I would ever do something similar, but include all my passwords, for everything.
Personally, I use Bitwarden with my wife. We pay $10/year, and we share a few things:
streaming services
online shopping services
some bank accounts
Basically, if it's something that doesn't allow separate logins and both of us will need, we share them.
Everything else is not shared. $10/year is completely fair to me, and I'm probably going to upgrade to the family plan at some point. I plan to self-host soon, so I'll have to see what plan we need to do that.
Bitwarden, DNS and email are the 3 services I pay for.
Passwords can't be inaccessible, free DNS services never have an LE API, and email is extremely difficult to self host. The uptime and security I expect for these things means I'm happy paying someone else to take care of it.
Bitwarden seem to be a great company and doing everything right (even though they are being annoyingly slow with passkeys on android, my only fault with their service).
Their subscription is extremely reasonable, so even if I figured I could self host it, I'd rather pay bitwarden
I honestly don't like passkeys, at least how they currently work. It seems the intent is to replace MFA with just one factor. I prefer 2FA with TOTP separate from my password manager, which means an attacker would need to exploit both to access my accounts.
That said, it's a sticking point for many people, so I hope Bitwarden gets it soon. I just probably won't use it.
And yet you still can't share numbers, names and addresses via Contacts.
Calendar supports sharing really well, with the option to show other people's calendars without merging them. And docs, of course. But not something as simple as an address list.
I would understand self hosting but those are for-profit entities as well. They might be subject to less regulatory oversight because they're smaller. They might not have as many resources to keep my data safe. They have benefits for sure but trust is not this easy to judge.
The difference is their business model is privacy. Google's business model is advertising. I'm Proton's customer, but advertisers are Google's customers.
Sure, but they also don't really have a business interest in keeping your passwords safe. If they have a breach, you either move your passwords or you don't, they don't see a financial hit. If Bitwarden or Proton have a breach, they lose paying customers to their competitors. They have to be better than their competitors to get your business, Google just bundles it with the rest of their stuff.
Also, Google is a massive target. They control the most popular browser, so there's a ton of value in exploits. Bitwarden and Proton are competitively smaller, so the attacks are likely to be less sophisticated vs attacks against Chrome. The surface area of attack for a separate password manager is also quite small, so it's comparatively easier to secure.
So yeah, that's why I use something outside my browser. I use Bitwarden for my password manager (I intend to self-host it soon), and it works well.
The LastPass hack was caused by a Sr. DevOPs not practicing secure OPs at home (was running a very old version of Plex). It didn't attack the technology stack itself, it attacked one of the employees. User passwords were encrypted, so attackers would need to break that encryption to access stored passwords.
You missed the Okta breach, which impacted support customers, but also didn't expose stored passwords.
Bitwarden hasn't been hacked, and the closest I've heard of is this security research, but that's using a feature that's disabled by default, requires using a keyboard shortcut, and doesn't work on all sites anyway. Yet they patched very quickly anyway.
I personally trust Bitwarden. They have acted professionally at every turn, and I can self-host if I choose. I don't trust LastPass or Okta (though I need to use Okta for work), and I don't particularly trust 1password despite them not being breached because their product is not FOSS. Chrome is a big product with lots of breaches every day, so I'd really prefer to not have my passwords stored by the same software stack as a massive hacking target. Bitwarden has separate desktop apps, so I can completely separate my data if I so choose.
My point was - no tech giant leaked passwords but small guys did. We have no insight into how internal policies look like and if they are actually followed, we can only see outcomes. Lastpass exposed encrypted passwords in 2022. In 2019 1Password app had a bug where it didn't clear master password after logoff and kept it in plaintext. Both enormous yikes for companies that deal primarily in security.
Yes, that's bad, but attackers would still need to break the encryption. Nobody does that, except maybe state level actors, and if you're worried about that, you wouldn't use commodity password managers.
1Password app had a bug where it didn't clear master password after logof
On the negative side, the master password remains in memory when unlocked (albeit in obfuscated form) and the software fails to scrub the obfuscated password memory region sufficiently when transitioning from the unlocked to the locked state. We also found a bug where, under certain user actions, the master password can be left in memory in cleartext even while locked.
To exploit this, the attacker would need access to the memory of the device and know how to find the password in memory. It's certainly not ideal, but it's also not very exploitable.
The newer version is worse in this regard, but it still requires that relatively advanced exploit.
In the conclusion:
However, each password manager fails in implementing proper secrets sanitization for various reasons.
This isn't unique to 1Password, it's probably common across password managers. Unfortunately BitWarden wasn't part of this research because I'm interested to know how it fairs here.
That said, I don't use or recommend either LastPass or 1Password because they're not FOSS, I just don't like FUD. I use and recommend Bitwarden because it's audited, FOSS, and competitively priced.
The real issue is that Google stores your passwords in plaintext. That's why they survive a password reset, or apparently now can be shared with others. Proton and Bitwarden encrypt your passwords so that nobody but you can access them, or at least in the case of Bitwarden, you can share with other users using pre-shared keys.
Plaintext passwords was a fuckup that they self-reported 5 years ago and affected some business users. Most browsers don't really encrypt locally stored passwords.
Based on prcinpipes Bitwarden is an obvious choice. With things like passwords I'm leaning into giving my keys to a company that, if it comes to be, can pay gargantuan ransoms.
Google is now letting users securely share passwords with members of their own family group over the internet, making it easier for everyone in the household to access passwords for shared services like Netflix.
The new ability is included in the Google Play services update for May 2024 that’s rolling out now, as reported by Android Authority.
The new password sharing feature just applies to ones that are stored in Google Password Manager, the company’s service that natively stores your passwords and passkeys in Chrome and Android and is linked to your Google account.
As of today, the new password sharing feature works on mobile — but apparently not via Chrome on desktop, yet.
Once you share a password with one of your family members, a copy of it will be saved into that member’s own Google Password Manager.
So if you want to share a password with anyone else, you’ll need to use Nearby Share to zap it over in person or use more rudimentary and / or less secure methods.
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