Yupp, just away from Lastpass. 🤮

Bitwarden and keepass are. Don’t use lastpass or the other bullshit youtube sponsors.

Any password manager is a good and secure alternative because they do not have any interest in knowing or exposing your password. They will run out of business very quick if they allow it! Passwords are just a method to identify you as you in the internet so they can sell you stuff! Even google will go to great extents to guarantee you is you because is at its core business. For sites where you do not trust passwords you can use 2FA of a secondary provider. For sites that are really important you probably will have a dedicated app (government ids, work…) as they do have invested interest on nobody else knowing your password. So yes, they are as secure as technically possible.

Special note about file based PM: the only person interested on that file to be secret is you! So those are great source of discomfort for me as files are heavily analyzed by systems and platforms. And any file can be brute forced open given enough processing power or enough tech (AI, Quantum computing…) So don’t lie yourself: going lone wolf do not make it safer.

I like to keep all my eggs in one basket, that way you can really keep an eye on them.

The only big danger of a good password manager is the fact all your passwords are stored under one.

To mitigate the risk, follow these practices:

• Use a good trusted, much preferably open-source option (for example, Vaultwarden, KeePassXC);
• Use a strong password;
• Do not EVER use the same password you use for password manager elsewhere;
• Use 2FA on both your password manager itself and all the accounts you store passwords for;
• Backup your password database in an encrypted way.

Together, these measures should save you from any trouble.

Now, why they are good:

• They can generate and store very strong passwords you would never make up, much less remember;
• You can be sure you won’t forget your password;
• They are convenient and can auto-fill passwords for you.

Generally, using a password manager is considered a superior option in terms of security and availability compared to keeping your password elsewhere, including your head.

Remember to think about your backup strategy if you use locally managed password software. I’ve helped (and been unable to help) some non-technical folks who relied on popular magazine/new site articles for software selection without good knowledge of how to properly backup their data.

I do SyncThing and KeePass.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncthing
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KeePass

Their URLs at time of writing are https://syncthing.net/ and https://keepass.info/

I don’t remember which KeePass UI for Android I use. I think I use Syncthing Fork on Android

That gives me the benefits of a cloud password manager, but the only cloud infrastructure is whatever SyncThing uses to do its peer-to-peer tricks. The password database is encrypted on disk with my root password, and then it’s encrypted end-to-end in transit because every SyncThing node knows the public keys of my other nodes.

I almost never upgrade KeePass because I’m afraid of losing access to my passwords on my phone. SyncThing I do upgrade because that’s easier to fix.

If you upgrade regularly, you’re vulnerable to the project being compromised. If you never upgrade, you’re vulnerable to whatever old code is vulnerable to. Personally I err on the side of not upgrading often.

I also have my own implementation of diceware https://www.eff.org/dice

Can’t believe noone mentioned this yet:

Any good password manager encrypts and decrypts your password file client side. The server should not even have the ability to read your passwords.

Even in the case of a leak of all of the server’s data, as long as your password for the manager was good, you’ve got nothing to worry about.

I’d say pick a PW manager where both client and server are open source. Pick a strong passphrase. Enjoy.

With the arrival of near infinite phonebooks, the drive and know-how to remember 100s of phone numbers is lost to humanity.

Passwords present added complexity to those of phone numbers. On top of a name to number (allowing a few collisions) passwords are required to be of certain length, contain an upper case letter, lower case letter, number, special character, and more importantly, a preset lifetime.

Password managers seem to be a safer and low stress bet for the vast majority. There will always a few exceptions who can do it all in their head. They don’t tend to advertise their presence.

It’s a balance of probabilities, like everything in security. Which is more likely? A. People are careful, using good, strong passwords, and maintain vigilance, but are targetted by an advanced attacker who will hack the protonpass system to get their database and the necessary keys to open it? Or B. People get lazy, use the same password for everything because remembering stuff is hard, and everything they own ends up protected by the modern equivalent of combo 1, 2, 3, 4, 5?

If you are truly capable of generating and memorizing enough good passwords to handle all of your accounts, that is technically more secure, because a password manager can create a single point of failure for all accounts. However, most people aren’t able to do that and will resort to crap passwords or using the same single crap password for every site.

It’s better than using the same few passwords everywhere. Passwords are being phased out though. The future is passkeys.

Without password managers: You either have weak passwords, or you constantly forget passwords and get locked out of your accounts.

Or you can remember the password to your email then use that to reset passwords every time and slam your head on the keyboard to generate a random password that you won’t need to remember because you’ll just reset it next time, but then its a hassle and you are relying on one point of failure, and you could get locked out if you email stops working.

So in conclusion: Password Managers

Remembering (and inevitably) forgetting passwords for all your different accounts is inconvenient, frustrating, and arguably less secure than a randomly generated password unique to each account.

Additionally, it can be tempting to reuse passwords for multiple accounts, which is trouble when a less-than-reputable service that you used that password on is breached, since that password wasn’t unique.

If you use an open-source, tried and true password manager (Bitwarden, Vaultwarden, KeePassXC) and keep a passphrase unique to that password manager only, you avoid the problems above which are way more likely to occur than Bitwarden passwords getting breached in plaintext, or a security vulnerability to the KeePass database.

Plus, most password managers offer support for passkeys, which are easier to register/use than passwords. They usually only require a “verify with passkey” button on a given website.

Bottom line, password managers are probably (definitely) more secure than any other reasonable solution that anyone has come up with.

To oversimplify:

Very secure, unique passwords written on paper and stored safely > Local password manager using secure passwords > cloud/synced password manager with secure passwords > anything with insecure passwords.

The trick is, will you actually maintian these security practices or will you start getting lazy if its too inconvenient (such as using a long password, and having to manually type it out).

I won’t say which manager I use, but I used a ‘tool’ on it which cracked my access password in very little time revealing all my passwords. - a bit worrying.

Do I still use that manager? Yes, it’s convenient and fits my risk profile.

Have I upgraded my master password? Yes. Less convenient, but is all a trade off.

If I was a higher profile target, my assessment may be different.