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Ask HN: How to store and share passwords in a company?

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Re: Ask HN: How to store and share passwords in a company?

#201
post #172

People overwhelmingly recommend SSO. Isn’t that lowering the security level? If that single account gets taken over, the attacker has access everywhere else too. Some places let you configure SSO+2FA, which helps; but in most cases clicking a social login button gets you full access. And speaking of a single point of failure, cloud password managers look even worse[1]. [1]: https://thehackernews.com/2023/02/lastpass-…

SSO + 2FA is more secure in practice than letting people create/manage their own accounts at every service. Because: - You can force a password policy centrally (minimum 12 char + uppercase/lowercase + number etc), for every service the company is using that supports SSO. - You can force 2FA, again for every service the company is using that supports SSO. - You can disable an account immediately from the central admi…

Yes good points.

I have to argue the second part of this though

> minimum 12 char + uppercase/lowercase + number

The first minimum char counts rule is great. You increase the entropy exponentially with every added char.

But the second part when you make rules about each individual char, then you are actually decreasing entropy. The space of possibilities actually shrinks every time a rule defines what a char must or mustn't be. An attacker now knows that certain things are guaranteed, and can tune their brute force algorithm to expect a big ascii letter, a large ascii letter, a latin number, an ascii special char. They now have a much smaller search space than before, when each char could be any utf8 char. You're basically leaking exploitable information about the password by having character rules.

Re: Ask HN: How to store and share passwords in a company?

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have SSO + 2FA in place, and would like to use Bitwarden for the rest of the password management. But for a company around ~50 people, the pricing feels too expensive, considering the only purpose is to manage a few passwords. So for now we are using Keepass which is kind of painful, but free. We would probably be willing to pay ~2$ per user per month, but instead it is 6$ if you want Bitwarden to work integrated…

Why not self-host Vaultwarden? It implements most functionality and supports the standard Bitwarden clients with virtually no resource requirements.

Was going to suggest the same, of course you're taking matters into your own hands, so know what you are doing, but it's free, very light weight and supports "organizations" as a way of sharing passwords between people. I have hosted it for my family for years and was very happy with it (until I switched to Proton Family, now doing ProtonPass).

And you get all the excellent Bitwarden apps and extensions to go with it.

Re: Ask HN: How to store and share passwords in a company?

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the answer. SSO, then password manager. I'd strongly recommend bitwarden, having deployed and managed it. I would warn against lastpass, strongly, due to papercut level issues everywhere. I haven't used 1password in an appropriate scenario to comment on it.

We have SSO + 2FA in place, and would like to use Bitwarden for the rest of the password management. But for a company around ~50 people, the pricing feels too expensive, considering the only purpose is to manage a few passwords. So for now we are using Keepass which is kind of painful, but free. We would probably be willing to pay ~2$ per user per month, but instead it is 6$ if you want Bitwarden to work integrated…

Ever tried Psono? (I am Sascha, the main developer behind it)

It has SSO / encryption / self hosting / ... and even the enterprise version is free for up to 10 users and if you need more you only pay €2.5 / user / month.

Re: Ask HN: How to store and share passwords in a company?

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the answer. SSO, then password manager. I'd strongly recommend bitwarden, having deployed and managed it. I would warn against lastpass, strongly, due to papercut level issues everywhere. I haven't used 1password in an appropriate scenario to comment on it.

We have SSO + 2FA in place, and would like to use Bitwarden for the rest of the password management. But for a company around ~50 people, the pricing feels too expensive, considering the only purpose is to manage a few passwords. So for now we are using Keepass which is kind of painful, but free. We would probably be willing to pay ~2$ per user per month, but instead it is 6$ if you want Bitwarden to work integrated…

We went with self-hosted Passbolt. Free, open source, and based on PGP. Only downside is having to explain PGP to the less technical users...

Re: Ask HN: How to store and share passwords in a company?

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't put in a place where history is saved What risks & attack vectors do you have in mind here? Also, in how far is this an issue with KeePass (whose files are encrypted)?

> What risks & attack vectors do you have in mind here? People with deleted passwords not being able to access the old file, or really any kind of mistake being irreversible.

I'm afraid I'm still not following. Isn't the point of having a history precisely to be able to roll back in case of mistakes?

Re: Ask HN: How to store and share passwords in a company?

#206

You generally want to minimize the number of passwords you manage; for instance, you should generally be paying the SSO tax and getting as many services as you can onto OIDC. After that, just do the cloud version of 1Password, which is easy to audit and manage access for, which you'll thank yourself for when it comes time to SOC2. Remember, as you give people access to passwords, that those passwords will need to be…

What’s SSO and how do I put vendor API keys into it? Like one of the most important APIs we have is just 1 key and that’s it. I don’t think the vendor has heard the term “key rotation”

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How to store and share passwords in a company?

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have SSO + 2FA in place, and would like to use Bitwarden for the rest of the password management. But for a company around ~50 people, the pricing feels too expensive, considering the only purpose is to manage a few passwords. So for now we are using Keepass which is kind of painful, but free. We would probably be willing to pay ~2$ per user per month, but instead it is 6$ if you want Bitwarden to work integrated…

Ever tried Psono? (I am Sascha, the main developer behind it) It has SSO / encryption / self hosting / ... and even the enterprise version is free for up to 10 users and if you need more you only pay €2.5 / user / month.

Passkey support (I know it's a pain) would be great...

Re: Ask HN: How to store and share passwords in a company?

#208

Don't. Give them access to all systems they need with their own user/password. That way you can revoke them (if/when necessary) without disrupting everyone else. Also automate as much as is reasonable, e.g. github access to push code to a dev branch, then enqueue merging of it. But a CI/CD pipeline does the actual deploy, the employee doesn't need to access any of the production systems. A very small number still wil…

I agree with this. But I want to ask a similar question as OP but for services. How do you handle service account credentials in a good way? Typically multiple engineers need to be able to test out a given service account. So a number of users need to have access to the credentials of that service account. And you need a good way to enroll a new service to service connection, i.e give a service account access to anot…

> How do you handle service account credentials in a good way?

Passwordless. If someone can log into a service account then it's not secure.

If you need direct access to systems then you grant temporary rights to individual users. To make this smooth you need to create a service to do it. Basically the flow would be for a user to request access and for the service to ask their direct manager (or whoever has the rights) for permission.

I know it's common for organisations to let IT operations handle this, but this is a terrible practice. Your IT department will almost never be in a position where they are the ones who have authority to grant access to anything without manager permission, a permission they should basically ask for every time. Also it's a massive waste of time for everyone. Yes, I know it's extremely common to just let IT operations do it anyway, but well, you shouldn't.

Re: Ask HN: How to store and share passwords in a company?

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have SSO + 2FA in place, and would like to use Bitwarden for the rest of the password management. But for a company around ~50 people, the pricing feels too expensive, considering the only purpose is to manage a few passwords. So for now we are using Keepass which is kind of painful, but free. We would probably be willing to pay ~2$ per user per month, but instead it is 6$ if you want Bitwarden to work integrated…

Ever tried Psono? (I am Sascha, the main developer behind it) It has SSO / encryption / self hosting / ... and even the enterprise version is free for up to 10 users and if you need more you only pay €2.5 / user / month.

I'll check it out, thanks!
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