333
Bitwarden Makes Change To Address Recent Open-Source Concerns
(www.phoronix.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
333 points (97.2% liked)
Technology
59440 readers
3636 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Because most people need a cloud solution for synchronization across devices. Unless you’re spinning up your own service like Nextcloud or similar for this, relying on a commercial cloud storage service for storing the file is just as dangerous (perhaps more so, as your attack surface is now across two third party services) as relying on someone like Bitwarden or Lastpass.
There's a big difference. You trust entities like bitwarden/lastpass/etc to properly encrypt the data, protect your master key, and trust their entire architecture behind the scenes.
When you encrypt the keepass DB that's all done by you locally with a open source client. No one knows your master key, and you get a simple encrypted file. You can hand that file to hackers if you want, will be useless without the key.
I put one of the copies of my keepass on onedrive, and syncs perfectly across all devices.
Companies can enshiffity at a moments notice.
Lol, imagine ridiculing users for trusting an FOSS company to handle their password management, and then storing your encrypted password DB in Microsoft's OneDrive 😆
encrypted is the key word
I knew a comment like this was coming, but unless you can show how microsoft can decrypt my kdbx I stand fully by my current setup.
I don't think Microsoft can decrypt your DB file, neither do I think Bitwarden can. Encryption happens locally on their open source clients too.
But I'm not the one disparaging trusting an open source program to securely encrypt passwords, you are.
Could you please show how bitwarden can decrypt a vault that's locally encrypted by a foss client?
"Imagine trusting any company with your passwords"
They created the client. In theory, they can have some backdoors. And since you store your files on their side, risk is greater, imo
This is where your lack of understanding of the open source thing is readily apparent to everyone arguing with you. If it was backdoored, many people would be calling that out. In fact, this was one of the exact reasons at the heart of the original concerns leading to this story.
The fact that the source is available means that we can see exactly how the data is encrypted, allowing assurances to be made independently.
If nothing else, I trust Bitwarden MORE because of that and I'm happy to pay them for their services since it helps find further development.
In theory. And not necessarily soon. Don't forget the context of this thread: we compare bitwarden with keepass, which does not offer to you your password base on their server side.
Trusting one FOSS client good. Trusting different FOSS client bad. Logic where?
That different FOSS client stores your data on their company's server. It's an important factor, IMO.
Dude, how is bitwarden hosting your own, locally encrypted (in FOSS client) password database any different than using keypass and syncing it however you want?
I don't even use Bitwarden myself, I'm using keepass too, but this attitude is ... weird?
I find risk slightly bigger when you encrypt your private data with the product of the company and store that encrypted data on servers of the same company.
Why: because if they have some backdoor now or plans to introduce it in future, they have all the time in the world to apply that backdoor to your data. Without you knowing it.
Bitwarden client is FOSS same as Keepass, though. Why aren't you afraid of Keepass having backdoor by "insert whatever big corporation sponsoring FOSS" giving said companies free access to your passwords you happily store in their clouds?
Keepass could have backdoors too. The difference is: authors of those backdoors are not from the same company, which I use as cloud storage.
I do not trust bitwarden to encrypt my data anymore than anyone trusts keypass to encrypt my data.
They're both open source and they both do the encryption locally; you're plainly mistaken.
And you are aware that bitwarden knows nothing about the passwords inside the vault and the vault is encrypted in zero knowledge type of fashion?
AND that Bitwarden does external audits?
AND if you loose your master password you are out of luck as they can't support you helping crack the decryption?
Except for the part that it's not a question of trust (being open source), there's no third-party architecture to trust (it can and should be self-hosted), the data on the server are also encrypted client-side before leaving your device, sure.
Oh, and you also get proper sync, no risk of desync if two devices gets a change while offline without having to go check your in-house sync solution, easy share between user (still with no trust needed in the server), all working perfectly with good user UI integration for almost every systems.
Yeah, I wonder why people bother using that, instead of deploying clunky, single-user solution.