this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
165 points (97.1% liked)

Selfhosted

39641 readers
291 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

(page 4) 8 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago (1 children)

vaultwarden syncs your passwords locally so even if your server is down the passwords remain available on your device. And it is a wonderful password manager, you can share passwords with your family, have TOTPs, passkeys.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (12 children)

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.

load more comments (12 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I self host Bitwarden and it's free to self host. You only have to pay for a license if you need multiple users or want to use their cloud services, I believe. My instance is 100% self hosted and completely isolated from the internet, and it works fine.

I self host it because I self host everything, but for credential managers I would never trust any 3rd party closed source utility or cloud service. Before I used a password manager I tracked them all manually with a text file and a TrueCrypt volume. I think giving unrelated credentials to 3rd parties is asking for trouble - they definitely don't care as much about them as you do!

If you're going to self host any credential manager, make sure you have an appropriate backup strategy, and make sure you have at least one client synced regularly so that you can still access passwords if the server itself dies for some reason.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 week ago (10 children)

I use KeePassXC and use syncthing to sync the database to each devise I own. This way I always have the newest version if the database everywhere and don't need to worry about Internet access at all.

load more comments (10 replies)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I don't, specifically because I don't trust myself to host that. I know what people will say here, but I trust 1pass way more than I could do it myself.

1pass uses your password plus a secret key to generate your full "password", meaning you need both to access your vault. The password you memorize, the key you keep safe somewhere (inside the vault is even good, since you probably have it open on another device should you need it). They publish their docs, and show how they encrypt your vaults. To them, your vaults are truly just random bytes they store in blob storage. They don't store your key, they don't store your password, they will not help you out if you lock yourself out. That's the level of security I want for a password vault. If they ever get breached, which hey, it can happen, the most someone will get is a random blob of data, which then I'd go and probably generate a new password and reencrypt everything again anyway.

Vs me hosting myself, I'm sure the code is good - but I don't trust myself to host that data. There's too many points of failure. I could set up encryption wrong, I could expose a bad port, if someone gained access to my network I don't trust that they wouldn't find some way to access my vaults. It's just too likely I have a bad config somewhere that would open everything up. Plus then it's on me to upgrade immediately if there's a zero day, something I'm more likely to miss.

I know, on the selfhosted community this is heresy, but this is the one thing I don't self host, I leave it to true security researchers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Yeah exactly. Passwords and OTPs are NOT the kind of thing you want to lose...

And while you obviously never want your data stolen, even LastPass they didn't get any actual passwords. Much like 1Pass, Bitwarden or Proton Pass, none of which have had any breaches of any kind that I am aware of. Too many low-hanging fruit.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nah, I'm with you, except I use BitWarden.

There are somethings either worth paying someone else to host, or where you trust a 3rd party more than you're own setup. I realize other users may feel different, but ultimately it's a judgement call

BW has been a pretty great opensource company, and it's worth my $10/yr for premium.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 121 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Because when whatever company gets a data breach I don't want my data in the list.

With bitwarden If your server goes down then all your devices still have a local copy of your database you just can't add new passwords until the server is back up.

load more comments (8 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›