1y ago

recommendations for personal and family password management?

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but recommendations for personal and family password management?

I finally switched to Firefox on my phone, because Chrome "privacy". And then when trying to find out how enable password storage, I accidentally set up Microsoft Authenticator as password management phone-wide. Realizing this meant cross-app password management, I finally accepted that my old approach of politely ignoring the problem and manually memorizing algorithmic passwords is no longer tenable. I honestly would prefer the anti-privacy approach where every service just uses oAuth and only one provider has my password, but we're not there today, so time to learn the new tech.

So basically, what's the current OSS best-practice for a one-stop-shop password management software? I know "OSS" and "big safe cloud storage provider" are kind of oxymoronic, but imho encrypted-cloud-storage is the best tradeoff between security and convenience.

And, ideally, something I could get my kids onto as well and manage some shared family-PWs as well, since I assume their password management strategies are either "reset every time" or "just use the same PW everywhere and it's a ticking time-bomb".

19 comments

I've used Bitwarden for ages and it fits your needs very well. Sharing the login info will allow the rest of your family to access the passwords and TOTPs too. Bitwarden does charge for TOTP use, but Aegis is amazing to use along with Bitwarden. You could setup Aegis on your device and then, if you wanted someone else to have access, you'd just export the data so they could import it into their Aegis app.
- Self hosting vaultwarden enables TOTP and other organizational features that standard bitwarden charges for.
  
  Good to know, I didn't talk about self hosting as it seemed like OP was aiming for it to be through a cloud provider. Its rad Bitwarden has both options and security is top notch either way!

KeePass.
It's got an app for basically all platforms, and you retain complete control over your data. Passwords go into an encrypted file, and you maintain that however you see fit.

I love Bitwarden and you can self host Vaultwarden. I'm not sure how OSS it is however.

It's going to come down to how much you trust the provider but I'd say bitwarden is pretty solid. I use it for stuff I'm not particularly concerned about (like disney+ or some random forum) and I use keepass for stuff that would be particularly bad if it was compromised like banking credentials, I keep backups of my keepass DB on separate physical media.
I also use a completely separate bitwarden account for all of my work accounts, keep that stuff separated, I only log into it from work devices and I never log into personal accounts from work devices.
- This workflow raises the obvious question for me: why not use keepass for everything, if you're already using it for your critical high security stuff? Worse ergonomics?
  
  I could do that but I only have a couple of things in keepass so it's easy to manage and backups are not very frequent. Bitwarden has EVERYTHING else and syncs across all my devices, if all that stuff was in keepass it would get combersome to generate backups every time I create a new entry or change a password. I could use nextcloud or something to sync the backup files but honestly this has worked well for me. I just setup keepass basically once, create a backup somewhere else, then use bitwarden for everything else.
  Alternatively, plenty of people trust bitwarden completely. Honesty I'd trust bitwarden more than a self hosted solution that I'll likely neglect and probably fail to keep up with best practices because I barely got it working in the first place, also screw ISPs that use CGNAT, it's 2023, give me an ipv6 address already.

If cost isn't too much of an issue check out The Mooltipass or one of its competitors.

Hello
We are using for years home and business gnupg (for public/private keys) + pass + QtPass + git (for remote central storage). We are using it even as a team with shared keys.

Try heylogin.com Read the docs to understand their system .. also not so technical people will love it, because of its easiness .

Despite the breach, LastPass has been pretty solid for me for over a decade. Syncs across devices, easy sharing between family members, etc. If your master pw and iteration counts are in the green, even them losing your data is relatively low risk, apart from exposing the sites you have accounts for, which is equal parts privacy & security issue. If I wasn’t so invested in LP, I would probably go elsewhere but since the horse has bolted…
I’ve also heard good things about Bitwarden and KeePass but can’t speak to how easy they are to set up.
- Even if you still trust lastpass, the pricing is not very competitive.
  
  True—my work paying for it is another disincentive to not move elsewhere. It’s basically not reached the tipping point for me yet but will do one day.

19 comments