No, at least not on its own. Let's not repeat the mistakes.
Password managers are the way to go and ONLY FOR RARE EXCEPTIONS we should use dedicated MFA, such as for email-accounts and financial stuff. And the MFA should ask you to set up at least 3 factors and ask you to use 2 or more. And if it doesn't support more or less all factors like printed codes, OS-independent authenticator apps and hardware keys like yubikey, then it should not be used.
Such as finding a dinosaur fossil of your families name clan.
Bitwarden the password manager includes a full passkey implementation, which doesn't involve any MFA.
No: - I can always export and import all my passwords from/into my password manager - My passwords always work independently of a password manager or any specific app/OS/hardware
That is not true for passkeys and makes them much more like tokens. Of course they don't have to be used in MFA, just like passwords.
This is only about your first paragraph, it doesn't affect your second.
Counter-example: I can write a password manager that will not allow you to export/import passwords.
There are cases where bitwarden doesn't work but chrome for example does. Easy to Google up.
For passwords however, I never heard of a case where a website only accepts passwords from a specific password manager - and how could they even do that right?
If the website accepts a password, then it can't prevent you from using the password manager you want. But if the website accepts FIDO2 passkeys, it's the same thing, isn't it?
For example: https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn-2/#dictdef-authenticatorselec...
> If the website accepts a password, then it can't prevent you from using the password manager you want. But if the website accepts FIDO2 passkeys, it's the same thing, isn't it?
Unfortunately not...
Those sound like requirements similar to those that can be enforced with passwords. My company enforces an SSO system with an MFA scheme that is controlled by the IT department. I can use my password manager for the password part, but I must use the mandatory MFA app.
In that sense, I am not sure it is so different from passkeys?
> In that sense, I am not sure it is so different from passkeys?
Yes, if it means "company specific SSO* and a company chooses to force you to use the hardware they decided on, then that is in fact not very different from the passkey constraints.
Also they are too complicated for an ordinary user. A physical key is much simpler and doesn't require any setup or thinking, and can be used on multiple devices without any configuration. And doesn't require a cloud account.
I think you're rejecting good solutions out of hand.
Meanwhile...millions of users trusted LastPass. Twice.
I’m not going to rely on myself never making a mistake. I want a solution that protects me even during stressful moments where I have a lapse of judgement and forget to check.
You might find the KeePassXC docs about the feature [0] to be informative.
If you're going to complain that all a phisher has to do to capture a password is create a website with the same title as the official one, then my reply would be something like "Duh. That's what the browser plugin is for.".
[0] <https://keepassxc.org/docs/KeePassXC_UserGuide#_auto_type>
[1] ...optionally, and on by default...
I’m absolutely looking for a browser plugin. I would refuse to use an auto-type feature that only checks the window title instead of, as a browser plugin would do, the site’s domain.
I was mentioning how auto-type worked because it's useful information for those who either are unwilling to use a browser plugin, or are like myself and simply have no need for one.
In general, opening a malicious URL exposes the user to unnecessary risk, so the correct solution is not to assume the user has visited a malicious site (since that would already be high-risk), but rather to prevent opening of malicious URLs. The most obvious solution is to treat any untrusted content as questionable. So I very carefully examine every domain I visit - as I say to my kids: have a model about who owns the computer you're talking to. Domains matter.
Now, this works for me. I'm not cognitively impaired, I have high conscientiousness, probably from working in military and classified defense contexts way back when, but I'm not really sure to be honest, could just be my personality. But it works for me.
I get that you want that extra safeguard, but it's just not a dealbreaker for me, especially since I'm highly suspicious of browser add-ons and the security implications they bring in. I guess I'm just extremely selective about what add-ons I'll use.
/me wonders if this is a "recommend me a nice open source, offline password manager" question in disguise.
That was years ago, so I’m going to check it out again. Thanks for the pointer.
Update: One thing that stands out immediately is a confusing mess of three different projects, two of them unmaintained, which all call themselves KeePassX or KeePassXC, sometimes linking to each other’s documentation. How do I even tell I’m facing the correct KeePass(X(C)?)? project?
Yes, I’ll figure it out eventually but until then, it’s confusing. Also, if a password manager project needs to be forked over and over and over again (how can a holder of the keys to the kingdom possibly go MIA on three different occasions in basically the same project?), then does that tell us something about how the project is governed?
Well, [0] lists a single project called KeePassXC, with [1] as its homepage. Search engines list [1] and [2] as the top results for the query KeePassXC, for whatever that's worth. [3]
> Also, if a password manager project needs to be forked over and over and over again ... then does that tell us something about how the project is governed?
No?
KeePass is Windows-only software. So, some folks decided to write KeePassX, which ran on Linux, OSX, and Windows. They got bored of that after a decade or so, called it quits, and one of the preexisting forks [4] became the widely-used one.
> how can a holder of the keys to the kingdom possibly go MIA on three different occasions in basically the same project?
In addition to the history I wrote above, you are aware that KeePass is still receiving stable releases? According to [5], it looks like 2.59 was released just last month.
EDIT: Actually, where are you getting this "confusing mess of three different projects" from? When I search for "keepass", I get the official home pages for KeePass and KeePassXC as the top two results, the Wikipedia page, and then the Keepass project's SourceForge downloads page. When I search for "keepassx", I get the official homepages for KeePassX and KeePassXC, the wikipedia page, the KeePassXC Github repo, and an unofficial SourceForge project page for KeePassX.
[0] <https://keepass.info/download.html>
[1] <https://keepassxc.org/>
[2] <https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/releases>
[3] And -because I'm a Linux user- not only do I have KeePassXC in my package manager, I also know that [1] is listed as its project homepage.
[4] ...which started like four years before KeePassX's final stable release...
[5] <https://sourceforge.net/projects/keepass/files/KeePass%202.x...>
When I searched for `keepassxc`, my search engine ranked eugenesan/keepassxc [0] higher than keepassxreboot/keepassxc [1], so the former was the first that I’d visit. GitHub says that eugenesan/keepassxc is 2693 commits ahead of keepassx/keepassx:master, so I assumed that eugenesan/keepassxc was a legitimate and meaningful fork of keepassx/keepassx. Maybe I’m entirely mistaken, and I was just tricked by a blunder of my search engine and eugenesan/keepassxc is just a random person’s fork? (But then again, if it’s just a random fork, then why does it show up at the top, and why so many commits ahead of keepassx?)
To add even more to the confusion, not only is eugenesan/keepassxc unmaintained, it also points to www.keepassx.org (why?), which in turn says it’s unmaintained, too.
If I was just mistaken and eugenesan/keepassxc is really just a random fork, then my earlier allegations are all moot. Thank you for clearing this up, and also for clarifying that the other (legitimate?) KeePassXC was a preexisting fork (so it would have been difficult for them and possibly even more confusing to users if they had taken over the abandoned KeePassX project).
I've tried DDG, Google, Bing, and Yandex. All of them rank official KeepassXC stuff in the top five results, and -with the exception of Bing- rank it above any other non-Wikipedia results. I didn't see this weird keepassx GitHub fork in the results from any of the search engines I tried.
> When I searched for `keepassxc`, my search engine ranked eugenesan/keepassxc [0] higher than keepassxreboot/keepassxc...
With the greatest of respect, I would expect someone who's sufficiently savvy to know what to do with a GitHub repo in their search result to also be sufficiently savvy to -at minimum- visit the homepage listed in the repo's About blurb and notice that [0] is the very first item in the list of "Latest News". I'd also expect that savvy someone to know to visit the repo's Releases page, notice that there are no published releases, and consider even more intensely that they might not be looking at the software they expected to see.
I can't explain why your search system is ranking this misleadingly-named GitHub repo so highly. AFAICT, noone with the repo owner's email address was ever involved in any public development on KeePassXC.
I’m using Kagi. They say they rely on several third-party search indexes. I can’t see which one they are using for which particular search request. What I do know is that the backends are of varying quality. However, after years and years of using Google (back when their search was still good), I got used to the fact that if they return a GitHub project as a top search result, then that project was usually meaningful.
> With the greatest of respect, I would expect someone who's sufficiently savvy to know what to do with a GitHub repo in their search result to also be sufficiently savvy to -at minimum- visit the homepage listed in the repo's About blurb and notice that [0] is the very first item in the list of "Latest News".
Forks sometimes don’t update the About blurb that they inherit, and I think that that’s exactly what happened in the bogus repo.
> I'd also expect that savvy someone to know to visit the repo's Releases page, notice that there are no published releases, and consider even more intensely that they might not be looking at the software they expected to see.
In this case, however, the Releases section said “13 tags.” Some projects don’t use GitHub’s Releases feature at all, and rely only on Git tags. It’s sometimes difficult to spot.
Passwords have always been bad. The problem is that users can't remember them. So they rotate, like, 3 passwords.
Which means if fuckyou.com is breached then your bank account will be drained. Great.
On top of that, the three passwords they choose are usually super easy to guess or brute force.
With a password manager, users only need to remember one password, which means they can make said password not stupid. You can automatically log in too with your new super secure passwords you never need to see.
Its the perfect piece of software. Faster, easier, more secure, with less mental load.
I don't, but even if I do, the simple fact remains that remembering one password is easier than 300.
If you have to remember 300 passwords, youre gonna choose 'password1' - 'password300'. Because we're not living hashmaps.
But with one password, I can easily make it even 40 characters and remember it. And anybody can do that.
If you DON'T use a password manager, you don't solve the problem of "everything is lost". Because people just reuse passwords as noted above.
So Experian gets breached, which is WAYYYYY more likely than your encrypted password manager getting breached, and now your bank is also open, and your Gmail, and your IRS.gov. whoops.
> does this assume you only use one device that you will always use
No, password managers work on all your devices and auto sync. How is it done so securely and without any hiccups? Because they're super simple pieces of software.
You just take the passwords, derive a key from the master password, and encrypt all the passwords. Then dump it in whatever online storage.
I could write a password manager in a couple hours.
cf. pass(1)[0][1]
[0] https://www.passwordstore.org/
[1] No, it's not hosted in the cloud (i.e., on someone else's servers) and that's a good thing. It's FOSS and can be compiled for Android/IOS (and has, see [2][3][4], least for Android). The DB (just a GPG store) can also be shared across multiple devices.
[2] https://f-droid.org/packages/app.passwordstore.agrahn/
[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.msfjarvis....
[4] Not sure about IOS versions, I don't have any Apple devices.
Passkeys is an interface between your password manager and a website without all the fluff with filling or copy-pasting passwords.
I don't love them. I don't love passwords either.
But while I don't fear passwords, I fear passkeys. The reason is that it makes the tech even more intransparent. My password manager stops working, completely dies or I can't use it anymore for other reason? No problem, I can fallback to a paper list of passwords if I really have to. This transparency and compatibility is more important than people think.
Passkeys lack that. They can be an interface like you described, but only if everyone plays along and they can be exported. But since there is no guarantee (and in practice, they often cannot be exported either) they are not a replacement for passwords. They are a good addition though.
Unfortunately, many people don't understand that and push for passwords to begone.
It's literally something like
hnkTKS7h2WCOBr3CxSKM51cSVKSkiKOSlQsMhtRZ0CU
And I would agree with that argument.