Hacker News Reader

I think local-first password managers are the way forward. Big tech companies already have way too much power and having them mediate our most important data is a bad precedent to set.

I like that you made this P2P, I designed one that sits on top of sqlite and is 100% local first but is not P2P, take a look if you are interested in some prior art in this space:

https://saveoursecrets.com/

I decided to go with native apps all the way, Rust backend and Flutter front-end but kind of regret it now with how the Play/App stores are such a hassle to work with.

Thanks for sharing! And I fully agree with you. The convenience that cloud providers bring is hard to match sometimes, but the tools exist to make it happen.

I'll check out your website and see what's up!

What does this offer over other local-first password managers? For example, there are a fair few Android/iOS apps based on KeePass (I currently use https://www.keepassdx.com on my Android phone).

How this solves sync seems useful. If you use Google Drive and KeePass clients you will probably run into conflicts between keepass "safe save" and how google drive does file versioning, resulting in runaway duplication of your kdbx files. I started using Syncthing and KeePass. File version conflicts are rare but still happen. Including sync in the app seems like a good idea.

It would be good to see screenshots of Bramble. The "sprawl of plugins and forks" in KeePass is why I use it. Many of the KeePass clients have modern UI's. I'll think about switching to Bramble when the sprawl begins.

The Keepass options for browser autofill are pretty rough, and don't work with flatpak installed apps either.

Keepass also can't match URLs with Regex which is something I make use of in bitwarden.

i think this is a great Idea but it doesnt beat any of the other free password managers like keepass.. I support this Idea tho and ill check on it to see where youve gotten! i usually just use keepassDX on my phone and keepassXC on my pc to create a local encrypted database file that i sync through MEGA sync which creates another level of encryption and i have 3 ways to get my password back if i lost them ( the database also gets saved in the phone) , the problem im seeing with youur product is just that is your browser is compromised your password is visible. compared to the keepass encrypted database its lacking security.

This looks like something I've been looking for! Excited to give it a try! I don't even use a password manager because of the things you've seemed to work around here. It's been painful.

Honestly, though, I'm most intrigued by your P2P solution. I've built a couple of web apps as custom html elements that use indexedDB for storage and I've been trying to figure out the sweet spot for syncing the data between apps. I think this nostr relay hits the mark as something people can feel comfortable not self hosting, while power users can host their own solution. Seems like a great solution, to me! Any advice as to some footguns with the approach? I'm very interested in giving it a try myself[0], so any notes you think would prevent some re-work would be really appreciated!

[0] as a public domain/oss-licensed module, if there's a reasonable method of packaging it as a standalone library

> TL;DR: I dislike private-equity and venture funded companies messing with our security, so I created my own Password Manager which is local-first, free, open source and as transparent as it gets.

I do too! And I appreciate your transparency about the vibe coding. But nowhere in the repository that I've found so far do you say who is writing this. For something like a password manager, I kind of need to know who's responsible for it, and who's reviewing the LLM source code, what they've done before, what their business model is, etc.

Can you share?

Fair enough. I like staying pseudonymous on the internet, but I also understand where you're coming from.

My name is Doug, based in Toronto, Canada. I've been a software engineer for over 10 years, working in various startups that handle very sensitive data (fintech, health tech, legal tech.) I've had the opportunity to build security-heavy software and directly handled sensitive info like SIN, bank details, patient histories etc.

Business model: This is essentially a passion project for me that I intend to keep working on - for usage within my family and the OSS community. This version of the app is always going to be free and open source. In the future if this were to ever take off and I now want to earn from it, I would probably do a business version with cloud storage (with self-host option)

The goal is offering an alternative that doesn't enshittify over time, secure, fully sovereign and convenient.

How's support for credit card form entries? That's the one thing that makes me miss 1Password as a current keepass user and will make me move over.

It exists and is thoroughly tested for common cases, but there might be tricky form shapes that haven't been covered.

Give it a try and if you find anything, I'll prioritize fixing it. I'm really keen on getting a top-notch autofill engine.

The sync part seems like a tricky one and a potential issue over the time, in the absence of a central server? From security perspective it always feel like a compromise if you are replicating the private key for any asymmetric algorithm

Love to see fellow Torontonian working on such great project. Let me know if you'd like to connect IRL.

I think you are going to run into a lot of anxiety about data loss. I did find the recovery code and peer to peer sync notes, which help.

Most people are not going to think through where to store an encrypted folder on a share so that there is a backup. If you are targeting just tech forward users that's probably okay, but for larger usage, you might think about full disaster recovery case where a computer and phone are both lost, as well as how to make it easy on where a copy is always stored or sync'd so users don't have to worry.

Yeah, fair assessment. I will add a section and more copy to the app to address this concern. Thanks!

Love the idea. It is great to innovate in this space. That adjustment will help.

It’s nice to always have more options but I don’t want it to be local, I lose the centralized system and having multiple devices syncing the pass database, or a turned off device, or an attack/ransom that took all your files including your passowrds, or your lost your device while traveling.. It’s better to have them secured somewhere safe and only accessible remotely, and there are plenty of self hosting options out there.

Really clean concept. Keeping everything entirely on-disk instead of relying on a third-party cloud is something I've been wanting to see more of.

Thank you! I'm a firm believer of this as well, especially with how things almost always turn out for venture backed companies. I feel like there's a push towards local-first and self-hosted solutions these days, and rightfully so.

Congrats! How’s it compare vs self-hosted vaultwarden?

Thanks!

Way less overhead than hosting your own vaultwarden instance, so way more user friendly with basically the same effect. The big difference is there's no server at all. With vaultwarden you're running a box that holds your whole vault and you have to keep it patched, backed up and secured (sysadmin skills basically). Bramble just syncs your devices directly so there's nothing to host or maintain = no single point of failure.

One tradeoff is both devices need to be online at the same time, since there's no server in the middle holding your changes for later. For me that's worth it and intentional.

What if I have multiple devices and some aren't currently online. Will they catch up when they do come back online?

Exactly that. Once the devices are simultaneously online they will sync.

Very cool! I like it!

What about using Nostr relays to also back up your data passwords? I built a library called Tablinum around this idea. Local first but backed up to Nostr relays using NIP-59 gift wrapped events.

https://tablinum.dev

Doesn't really apply here because every synced device essentially serves as a backup

With that said, I really do like Tablinum! I might need that for something else. How are merge conflicts handled?

This is really awesome. I've long wanted something like this, especially the local first with p2p sync. Why did you choose nostr over direct p2p with iroh which has dumb relay as fallback?

Is there a recovery path, like an encrypted export or recovery file; say phone stolen, laptop dies, etc.., or is the vault only as durable as my most reliable device?

The latest browser extensions now have an export feature in the settings page. Mobile will get it too. Besides that, the more devices are synced via P2P, the more backups you have (each device has a copy of the vault)

This looks and sounds interesting! Where are the passwords stored locally? Like bramble (local) stores it or it creates a reserved disk space which is prohibited to access?

They are stored in the browser's storage, fully encrypted at rest. On mobile they're stored in the app's private sandbox, also encrypted at rest.

To clarify: the protection comes from the encryption, not from where the file lives. Cleartext never touches the disk.

What ai tools are you using if I may ask, genuinely interested.

I used Claude Opus during this project within Zed editor. Nothing else.

How does it handle browser autofill. What if you have to fill in a box that has a non-standard label? These are things I rely on with 1Password.

When I hear P2P I imagine my data going through other people's devices - but it sounds like this is a private P2P network.

ah yes, I didn't even think of this! It's fully private and I'll update my copy to indicate that. Thank you!

We will never have enough local opensource password manager so keep it up

Ah just realised no iOS release, that's a non-starter.

I've submitted it for review. Fingers crossed it doesn't take long

The only crypto you accept is Monero?

yeah I really like monero, but will add more options soon

So how much of this is vibe-coded?

Vibecode as in one-shotting features in one prompt and calling it done? None. Deliberately planning each feature carefully, laying out the arch work, executing the plan and then carefully test and review? Most of it.

You built your own sync engine? Why?

Most sync engines are targeted towards being fast. I suppose for a PM you'd want one that's very resource efficienct. I'm just spitballing here, I'm not OP

It's a hard feature to get right, it is complex and networking across the internet is unreliable. I am an advocate for local-first and P2P, but I would like to see contributions to existing libraries rather then weaker implementations

if you mean why I didn't choose a lib like automerge, yjs and instead handrolled it - that's because these libs are geared towards plaintext.

Bramble's sync is built around its own encrypted vault instead. When two devices conflict it just compares timestamps on the encrypted entries and keeps the newer one as-is, without ever unwrapping your per-entry keys to merge. Nothing off the shelf did that against my vault format, so the core is custom. It's a pretty simple implementation tbh

Last writer wins may be sufficient for some folks but for me, any potential data loss in an app like this is a deal breaker. I hope you'll consider some kind of merge conflict detection and surfacing that to the user. Even keeping a list of deleted items and showing that can be a good start.

This deserves a bit more explanation (sorry, on the phone, can't look at the code in the next couple of days). So, if I change the password and update it on the phone, then add a web site on the desktop, when they sync, the desktop entry will overwrite the new password? Hope it's not that simple.

Screenshots?

added to the repo!

Show HN: Bramble – Local-first password manager