this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 month ago (13 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 month ago (2 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 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).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I have my Vaultwarden public so I can use it at work too, but my firewall blocks all external IPs except my work's IP.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

A VPN? you still need a reverse proxy/domain to use it don't you?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

DNS challenge? It is the 1st time I read about it.

I suppose in your LAN you need no VPNs then?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You can forward a Wireguard port, exposing it to the internet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Hmm, interesting, how would I start doing this?

I use a Synology NAS BTW, so it already gives me a Synology subdomain to mess around.

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