I’m going to move away from lastpass because the user experience is pretty fucking shit. I was going to look at 1pass as I use it a lot at work and so know it. However I have heard a lot of praise for BitWarden and VaultWarden on here and so probably going to try them out first.

My questions are to those of you who self-host, firstly: why?

And how do you mitigate the risk of your internet going down at home and blocking your access while away?

BitWarden’s paid tier is only $10 a year which I’m happy to pay to support a decent service, but im curious about the benefits of the above. I already run syncthing on a pi so adding a password manager wouldn’t need any additional hardware.

  • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    4·
    1 month ago

    Fully agreed.

    Accessing Vaultwarden through a VPN gives me peace of mind that it can’t be attacked.

    Another great thing about Bitwarden is that it’s possible to export locally cached passwords to (encrypted) json/csv. This makes recovery possible even if all backups were gone.

    • dan@upvote.auEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      Accessing Vaultwarden through a VPN

      Hmm maybe I should move mine to my VPN. Currently I have it publicly accessible so I can access it from systems where I can’t run other VPNs for security reasons (work systems). I use a physical token with FIDO2 (Yubikey) for two factor authentication though, so I’m not too worried about unauthorized access.

      • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        Vaultwarden is one of the few services I’d actually trust to be secure, so I wouldn’t worry if you update timely to new versions.

        • dan@upvote.auEnglish
          1·
          1 month ago

          I hope it gets security audited one day, like Bitwarden was.

          • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            1·
            1 month ago

            Because they use the official apps/web-vault, they don’t need to implement most of the vault/encryption features, so at least the actual data should be fine.

            Security audits are expensive, so I don’t expect it to happen, unless some sponsor pays for it.

            They have processes for CVEs and it seems like there wasn’t any major security issues (altough I wouldn’t host a public instance for unknown users).

            • dan@upvote.auEnglish
              2·
              1 month ago

              That’s a good point. I didn’t consider the fact that all the encryption is done client-side, so that’s the most important part to audit (which Bitwarden has already done).

      • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        4·
        1 month ago

        Yes, Bitwarden browser plugins require TLS, so I use DNS challenge to get a cert without an open port 80/443.

        The domain points to a local IP, so I can’t access it without the VPN.

        Having everything behind a reverse proxy makes it much easier to know which services are open, and I only need to open port 80/443 on my servers firewall.