In 50 years time, who knows if any of these companies will be around. But I’m pretty sure that my grandchildren, should they want to, will be able to open a gpg encrypted gzipped file (with the passphrase I’ll leave them) containing my passwords in a csv file.
technical possibilities aside, do you presume your grandchildren will be technically apt?
I am pretty sure 99% of people would halt at 'gpg' , and that's now -- not 60 years from now.
LLM entities have bills to pay too.
Please do not mock gpg.
I have been using gpg for 25 years now (and PGP before that). It works. It encrypts. It decrypts.
It is in vogue to mock gpg on HN and recommend more modern solutions. As an experiment, I tried adding one of those modern tools (rage) to my ansible configurations, just so that they get regularly installed and maintained on my servers (without actually being used). The setup broke within less a year.
Are the modern tools more cryptographically secure? Undoubtedly. Does it matter in practice for me? Not at all.
Longevity is a big deal and is under-appreciated.
Filippo nailed it with this piece: https://words.filippo.io/giving-up-on-long-term-pgp/
My kids? I really am not so sure at all. Still too early to tell for sure but so far I don't think any will be as technically savvy as I am. I really doubt they'd know what GPG (or PGP) are and how to use it.
The apathy is real and I don't see it getting better.
Don't take security advice from an AI.
In fact, if you consider the impact fully, the best way of managing passwords still seems to be writing them down on a post-it note and keeping it in your wallet - hell, even sticking it to your screen doesn't look so bad these days, compared to alternatives.
Modern infosecurity is absurdly counter-intuitive at high level. Consider that your Google account or your WhatsApp (or Signal) chats are much more secured than your medical data or bank accounts or anything that predates Google. For anything in the real world, there is always a recovery procedure, no matter how much bad luck you had or how badly you screwed up. In the worst case, you might end up needing to chase some documents to authorize or notarize other documents, or show up in court, but you can get your access back. It's insane to imagine the world, in which a single fuckup could wipe out your medical history, your bank account, or any proof of your existence in government systems - and yet, this is exactly what is the case with any modern SaaS that follows "best security practices".
There's literally nothing else in this world that's so easy to mishandle as security in commercial software services.
It's kinda ludicrous to think we'll lose the ability for something so simple.
Sorry, but I already have to google each time I want to figure out how to open various file formats.
"Google, what ffmpeg flags do I use to convert this .flv file to .mp4", "what are the flags to losetup or kpartx to mount 'disk.img' as a loopback device?", "how do I extract an '.ab' backup from 'adb backup'?"
These are all things I googled before llm.
I know reading the docs is considered uncool for some reason, but it really does work.
First result with simple command. I went from KeePassXC to `pass` & back to KeePassXC. But I question the integrity and/or motive of people like you.
The AI model will be of certified provenance and run on attested hardware [0] so this won't be as much of a security issue as you might expect. Naturally the various three letter agencies will have full hardware access including query history.
Periodically, hardware zero days will drop and all hell will break loose.
Alright that's enough speculative dystopian fiction for me for today.
Since ChatGPT? ~all of them except maybe my grandparents.
Though the tooling isn’t great – I’ll probably switch to Vaultwarden sometime this year.
Technically I think I could drop the trigger if the desktop app would open by making a temporary file copy and syncing back (ironically Keepass2Android is very good at this).
https://www.f-droid.org/packages/com.kunzisoft.keepass.libre...
This is because AFAIK desktop syncthing doesn't like it if the file gets replaced out underneath it. This might've changed.
I’d strongly prefer an open source and selfhostable option, but each time I’ve evaluated Bitwarden in the past, it was a big enough downgrade from 1Password that I didn’t think switching was a good option.
If the experience ever becomes as seamless, I’ll be switching.
I check BW every so often but it always feels less polished UI wise. For all the complaints people had about 1P moving to electron, it’s UX is still the best out there.
Why would someone make a feature like this?
I'm confused why some companies (including Amazon and Steam) insist on family features. The mental model behind this is more prescriptive than descriptive - it doesn't match to how users and their families function; rather, it insists on some activities to a) exist in family, and b) be not allowed outside of family.
Or simply: how many people have actual family listed in their Steam / Amazon "family sharing"?
Bitwarden doesn’t have families per se, it’s got “organisations”. You can setup unlimited number of organisations and users can get invited and join them. Which is very handy for example my wife and I can login and order our groceries from the supermarket using the same account. Or that we can both login and use our electricity company’s web portal which only allows one account per household. All without needing to send each other passwords and updated passwords back and forth.
For what it’s worth Bitwarden doesn’t use that term, they call it Organisation. Personally I feel like ‘Group’ is actually the better term.
But yeah, it's a content and positioning call for the product and marketing teams to make.
I use family sharing with actual family for my Steam account and all video streaming services. Am I weird? The reason is because streaming services allow sharing under a single paid account, and my wife & kids don’t want to pay for separate accounts, and don’t want to have to authenticate separately on shared devices (TVs, game consoles, iPads, etc). Steam family sharing works across different Steam accounts, and sharing a single account doesn’t work, so Steam isn’t particularly relevant to the discussion of family sharing of passwords. Steaming accounts, on the other hand, all assume they’re being used by a whole family, and the main reason is because of shared devices; the family TV itself logged in. So, they all offer profiles under a single account. Netflix clarifies that family sharing means the people in a single household, maybe others are similar.
We use password family sharing as well. My wife and I share bank and credit card accounts. My wife needs my accounts sometimes to do certain things — you might be surprised how many banks do not offer joint accounts and still treat wives as second class citizens. We share the Netflix & Amazon accounts with the kids so they can use them. I pay for a 1Password family account and share it with my aging father who’s been losing passwords. These things are all pretty useful for me.
I guess you’re making me wonder why someone wouldn’t make a family sharing feature, when it solves real problems and users are asking for it?
That is particularly true for anything dealing with security. I evaluated both BitWarden and 1Password when we wanted to migrate away from LastPass. My recommendation was to eventually go with BW. Its open-source nature was a factor, but for a corporate use the UX factors were even more prominent.
Over a course of a month, I ran into several subtle footguns with 1P. Search included only some of the fields. Password reset/rotation flow was easy to mess up (thanks to the confusing + inconsistent "copy field" functionality) and get into a situation where the generated password that was stored in the vault was different from the one that was set: in my tests there was 50/50 chance of accidentally regenerating the password before the vault storage step after submitting the new one for a remote service.
There were a whole load of "features" that didn't make any sense. The UI for 1P was a real mess. The feeling I got from it was that their product had been captured by Product Managers[tm] desperate to justify their own existence by shipping ever more Features[tm] without considering the impact on the core functionality.
BW's UI is by no means perfect, and their entry editing flow is far from ideal. But at least most of the actual usability snags in their browser extension have a common workaround: pop the BW overlay out from the browser, into a separate window. Their open-source nature and availability of independent implementations mean that there will be alternatives, should BW go down the same features-features-and-more-antifeatures hellhole in their race to eventually appease their VC backers.
Less is more.
Sounds like our experience with it could not be more different.
> The UI for 1P was a real mess.
In what way? You described how you feel about the UI, but I’m curious about actual specifics.
It’s entirely possible that I’m just too accustomed to it because I’ve been using it for many years, but what you’re describing is how I felt about Bitwarden.
I can completely see choosing BW in a corporate setting for a host of other reasons. But for me personally, the priority is a tool that gets out of my way and just works.
The tool that has done that is 1P.
> Less is more.
That really depends. If less means that the password manager doesn’t get used, then less is less.
It’s their No. 1 selling point.
> In 50 years time, who knows if any of these companies will be around
1Password has local clients. If you have the password, you should be able to unlock the vault locally.
I have installed the "1password-cli" package on my airgapped linux machine with no network access ('op --version' gives me 2.30.3).
If I run 'op vault list', it tells me I have to add an account. When I run 'op account add' it tries to connect to 1password's servers and won't let me proceed without internet.
I don't see how this "local client" is helping if all the auth infrastructure goes through their servers.
Is it possible to export as a file, take that with you on whatever medium (eg. USB key, CD-ROM, future isolinear chip), put it on a brand new PC you built from scratch and never connected to the internet, and open it in some kind of standalone viewer?
Originally it was an app with no remote component. The vault was yours to look after. Most people kept it in Dropbox to make it accessible anywhere. The vault itself actually had an html file in it that you could open in a pinch that was able to decrypt secrets (only for reading, from memory).
1Password as a service came later.
Dropbox came later and security minded folks were wary. Honestly, I trust 1Password sync more than an encrypted db on a general purpose cloud file sync, but maybe that’s naive.
Super contrived, but you could probably just copy the sqlite dbs of your vault it creates locally to another PC along with the 1Password installer and it might let you sign in with just your master key.
It's truly local first and will work fine in an airgapped situation.
It's also designed to be self-hostable[2], is open source [3] and the API is well documented[4].
[1] https://saveoursecrets.com/ [2] https://saveoursecrets.com/docs/cli/self-hosting/ [3] https://github.com/saveoursecrets/sdk [4] https://docs.rs/sos-sdk/latest/sos_sdk/
Passwords, even ssh keys and passkeys, are little pieces of plain text. If you think needing a specialised sdk or cli to retrieve plain text is a good software architecture, I think we see the world quite differently.
We clearly see things differently but I think using computers to make our lives easier is worthwhile and storing/managing our secrets securely, effectively and conveniently is better managed by software than some ad-hoc setup.
Nitpick, passkeys are not text, they are binary blobs.
Because I feel pretty confident that gpg will still be around (though hopefully long deprecated), that gzipped files would still be able to be opened, and everyone would still be able to open a csv file. Without any specialised software, sdk or whatnot.
If this scenario doesn’t concern you, that’s fine, 20 years ago it wouldn’t have been my concern either. But the older I’ve become, the more I think about this stuff.
Pick the formats your storing and handle security at the container. This might be an encrypted system that is copied and updated over decades or a physical storage safe or box.
[1]: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-you...
I was a Protonmail founding member. I used and evangelised them for years until I realised that they are more interested in chasing the next shiny thing (hey we have a crypto wallet now!) instead of fixing longstanding bugs and performance issues in their mail client.
As for hosted outside the US, I’m pretty sure the vaultvarden instance running under my desk is also hosted outside the US (unless I’ve somehow been magically transported to the US). Plus, I get to physically lock the door when I leave the house and my cat usually sleeps on top of the sever which adds a level of furry protection which proton pass could never achieve
After having used Bitwarden for more than 4 years, I only switched last week, so I'm still in the honeymoon phase. But it has everything I used in Bitwarden and more, most notably all the usability features that I was missing in Bitwarden.
Given how I have experienced technology up until this point, my assumption is that everything I will create for work or for pleasure, is more or less ephemeral. It has certainly proven true for work.
Everybody has a different idea of what long term means, but I think of it as millennia from now. The kind of time frame that the Long Now Foundation talks about.
I.e, we will still be able to store and transfer sequences of bytes conforming to some specification (file format), and we will be able to attach names to those blobs in some namespace. The concept is too general to ever lose its usefulness.
There are a few key things I have learned in the third of a century that I've been working with data: Data lives longer than apps and longer than people. We will always need units of data that have their own life cycle and are reasonably self describing and self contained (i.e meaningful without resolving external references).
As long as an open source (or at least open specification) exist, these files will remain being openable. ...or at least until curious minds are able to crack them!
Just like it's fairly easy for us to even run software from 50 years ago thanks to emulation. As long as your software run on a platform popular enough to have a good emulator. But for PDF and zip and jpeg reading software that will definitely be the case.
We're already 1/3 of the way there.
Curious, how is Excel encryption? That may be a more approachable format than CSV GPG, and though technically the CSV GPG is more simpler, it may be less familiar to users in 100 years. Excel will still be around ;)
They apparently use AES-128. Not quite the level of Bitwarden, which uses hashing (argon2 or PBKDF2) and AES-CBC-256 simultaneously.