It’s got my (not particularly technical) wife using unique strong passwords for all her online accounts and made family password sharing easy. I think the convenience of the cloud is key to this.
I get that there’s a security risk that 1Password gets compromised and the app is infected with malware or there ends up being a vulnerability on their encryption scheme but it still feels like a net improvement to my overall online security.
Also MFA can help mitigate the risks of the passwords being compromised.
This is what I’m at on it too. Without cloud syncing convenience wins and we end up using simple passwords over and over again.
With cloud syncing I believe we are much more secure than we would otherwise be.
Especially across multiple users.
EDIT: Given the replies below, I should be clear that I'm not interested in comparing to LastPass, I'm comparing to Bitwarden. LastPass had an obviously bad security model that failed to encrypt everything, but Bitwarden does not have that flaw.
The part where they said they do not store either the key or password on Dropbox.
But what you said is also an additional benefit.
That said, the same risk applies to any client you use. Someone could have compromised the latest update of KeePassX as readily as they can compromise LastPass's client. If you don't have automatic updates then that's helpful, but I'm not sure it's producing enough security to be worth the extra hassle.
They don't have to get bad code into an MR (though that's one option), they could compromise the website and have it distribute a different binary. If you build it from source you're safe against that, but are you really building it from source?
Also, remember that the same logic applies to Bitwarden: they need the master password and therefore must compromise the client during the window where you update it.
Dropbox is not added security in this setup, it is a natural factor if what is being transferred [the keepass file(s)] is sufficiently secure in itself.
Another reply indicates that the main thing is that you don't have to trust the cloud service to do the encryption and zero-knowledge stuff right.
That plus security through obscurity: no one is presuming you're going to come out of a Dropbox hack with millions of password vaults. Even finding them would be... nightmarish. (Though I suppose you could somehow hack a Dropbox file index database?) The value of a target like LastPass is absolutely insanely high: it's a concentrated honeypot of encrypted vaults.
Plus, the Android app makes using a Dropbox synced folder location fairly trivial, so that works pretty well. And you can set your own number of password rotations, which, while annoying when it takes my phone 5-10 seconds to unlock, realllllllly helps ensure no one else is going to crack this vault if they ever got it.
LastPass is a disaster, but in theory these benefits are true of Bitwarden as well. They say they encrypt the entire vault, no exceptions, and do the encryption entirely on device.
I can see the honeypot argument, but Dropbox is also a big honeypot for different reasons (tons and tons of plain text information that could be very valuable in the right hands). And I don't think finding the vaults would be as hard as you think it would, because searching for encrypted files should be relatively easy, and any encrypted file is probably worth attempting to crack.
I'm not trying to argue for cloud password managers, I'm totally open to being persuaded and would immediately switch if I were, but I'm really failing to see where the added security is versus Bitwarden. Bitwarden is open source just like KeePassX, so if it did not implement the security model that claims to I think someone would have blown a whistle by now.
Assuming that I trust Bitwarden not to lie about their security model, what do I gain by piecing together multiple tools to accomplish the same thing?
In case of keepass and independent sync(doesn't have to be Dropbox), software that sees master password doesn't need access to the internet. Can be even airgapped if you are extra paranoid.
So to sum it up: keepass + sync is better, because there's no single party that is even able to screw up you to the point of leaking your passwords. "Impossible to fail" is better than "they are doing their best, pinkie promise".
Also - why pay recurring fee for yet another cloud storage, when I just need plain encryption software.
All of this applies to KeePass, minus the browser extension bit (which is trivial to avoid by not using the browser extension). The only difference is that you can theoretically firewall KeePass from the network, which I'll grant you would make a difference, but the fact that you reserve that for the extra paranoid suggests most don't do that.
> because there's no single party that is even able to screw up you to the point of leaking your passwords
Again, only true if you block network access. If not, you have as many points of failure as with Bitwarden, because only the client needs to be compromised to get both vault and password.
> Also - why pay recurring fee for yet another cloud storage, when I just need plain encryption software.
Bitwarden free is plenty for me right now, so this doesn't play into my calculus.
Personally, I'm not interested in making the switch if I'll have to fiddle with firewalls on all my devices in order for it to be more secure for my current solution. It's not that this conversation is made me think less of KeyPass, it's that I'm yet to see a convincing argument that Bitwarden is worse than what I would end up with in practice by switching.
That being said - bitwarden is pretty transparent in what they do, compared to the competition and I'm seriously considering giving it a try (but with self hosted backend).
I looked at using them but ultimately decided against them, a conflict overwriting a password scares me more than even just using chrome sync and calling it a day.
It does seem to be solvable though. I could see myself using SyncThing+ KeePass if I ever became unsatisfied with BitWarden and I found an app without too many sync issues.
Where I do think it resonates is fundamentally it's just a bad idea to centralize things like this. It may be a necessary to construct a commercial business around this, but centralising massive amounts of trust across unrelated entities into ANY party is just a fundamental compromise that shouldn't have to be made. We would all be better off with genuine decentralised infrastructure to make all this work.
What does irritate me is that all these companies are full of "zero trust" marketing spiel but their products always actually end up coming back to placing 100% trust in them in the end.
This is reasonably safe, as long as you're careful with your master password, no different form GPG.
I'm not here to argue the merits of encryption. I understand it very well. I'm only considering my own levels of comfort and need to trust a 3rd party as well as pay a recurring fee to store my keys/passwords.