- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
If you are interested in privacy you are probably interested in password storage … plus I wanted everyone to know about the inevitable future enshitification of this product. Spread the word and replacement recommendations are welcome too.
Vaultwarden will survive. Since the client is open source, once they close the API and break compatibility of the clients with Vaultwarden, the old version of the app can simply be forked and rebranded. I also do hope that the KeyGuard app will continue to support vaultwarden as well since if bitwarden closes the API and makes a breaking change, as is likely to happen, it will break KeyGuard as well, but it will still work with VaultWarden for some time.
The real issue is that many people who are using Bitwarden aren’t savvy enough to host Vaultwarden in a secure way. Many people are careless with things like secret keys and such and dont know how to properly secure a web facing app or a VPN into their local network. But anyone who self hosts should result learn those things anyway. This one just happens to be a particularly high risk since it contains all of your passwords for everything else.
This is why despite me self hosting some things I don’t rely on vaultwarden. I’m a flawed person and my family has no idea about anything. I don’t need to stretch my imagination very far to think of a handful of reasons why it would fail my situation. I’ll gladly pay for a password manager to not have to deal with that.
Same! I self host a number of things, but I just didn’t trust myself with something as important as this. I had been paying for bitwarden even though the free plan was sufficient, just to show support. But obviously not if they go this route. I will also gladly pay for a password manager to not have to deal with that.
That’s where I was for years until I got that surprise $80CAD credit card charge a few weeks ago. Now I have 11 months to either go with someone else or figure out a self-hosted solution I can trust. It will need several layers of backups the family can actually access in an emergency.
Just learned about KeyGuard. But I dislike their LICENSE:
All Rights Reserved
Yeah, not the best. But at least there is an alternative.
We really need a VaultWarden paid service, if there isn’t anything against doing so in the license.
I don’t know why the server needs any specialized software at all though. In the end, if it’s just some password history, why not just have a client that allows generic storage backends and you can upload to Filen or S3 or whatever else you use?
It uses a database and it’s totally possible to use SQLite as the database and sync that elsewhere. You could then find or make a small client that just accesses that db directly rather than a web service, I suppose. Though there are already several apps out there that store passwords locally and their data files can be synced, if that’s what you want.
But if you’re doing that then you may not be using this in the most common way or may not understand the risk involved. This is likely to have every one of your logins, not just a single login that may or may not be used on other sites, but the specific username and password and which site it’s associated with. On addition to access to those accounts, this links all of your accounts to a single identity which companies spend billions to do with advertising IDs, cookies, embedded scripts, and lots of other, usually shady, practices. This is a gold mine, though usually only for one or a few users, so generally not a major target unless you’re being targeted personally for some reason. So, even if they don’t get the passwords, they’ve now linked every account you have on every site to your identity.
If you are allowing the database to be relatively easily obtained by syncing it to a central location accessible over the internet, a bad actor who gets it can even take their time brute forcing any encryption that may be present in the database, but if you don’t keep encryption keys only on your local device because you want to be able to use it elsewhere, then you probably stored the keys along with the db and they dont even have to bother with that, or if it uses password based encryption, they just have to guess or brute-force a single password.
If it’s behind a properly secured web service, then even if they find an exploit in the server software, they likely have to do many queries over time to get much data and the server can mitigate that risk and/or alert the owner about new logins and such. A database in the hands of the bad actor can’t complain about too many attempts to access it or notify anyone that it’s been copied.
So, IMHO, it’s a bad idea to use synced local password managers unless you have a very robustly secure way of storing the database and the encryption keys.
afaik everything is encrypted. not like a big blob, but the properties of items are encrypted separately, if the encrypted export format has anything to do with the database structure
That’s positive at least. I hadn’t looked at that part. Still having the whole dump of data and attacking it locally vs having to query a web server repeatedly for each attempt is a major advantage. This is why I significantly prefer Vaultwarden over a synchronized database, especially if it’s publicly synchronized in a publicly accessible git server or something making it relatively trivial to copy.
Yeah I was imagining a system more like Password Store - use Git to version control secrets which are encrypted using some form of asymmetric encryption.
You store the private key somewhere you control, like a USB drive or something. Same as Bitwarden’s master password.
Yeah, there’s still a risk if you’re exposing the encrypted passwords. For example there is still some risk that governments have backdoors in some kinds of encryption, which of course means other malicious actors do as well. And there’s still brute forcing which is mitigated with a webserver layer in front of the raw data.
But there are lots of existing applications for that like keypass and its forks. Vaultwarden is more about the web services front end to the data than the data storage itself. And a web service benefits from a relational database over a flat file.
Good to know KeyGuard is an alternative. My main worry was with the extension no longer being compatible as, like you said, I doubt they’ll continue to keep the client and API open.
Yeah, fortunately Vaultwarden has enough users that probably someone will eventually create an extension for it. And in the mean time you just have to make sure to use an old version of the existing extension until that happens. It’s not like the changes in Bitwarden will affect Vaultwarden directly. The old client versions will still work until Vaultwarden changes something.