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I trust the one I wrote for myself. I would have a hard time trusting a 3rd party tool without a lot of insight and feedback as to its design and implementation, and credible assessments of its trustworthiness.
It's a convenience vs. security tradeoff. The fact is, most people can afford to adopt a flawed security model to give themselves greater convenience, because most people aren't being specifically targeted and attacked. I doubt many people realize that they are making such a tradeoff, but that's more about dishonest advertising...
I guess password managers seem like one of those few decisions that made my life both more convenient and more secure (after the initial adoption). Out of curiosity, what could one use instead of a password manager that would be closer to the “more secure” side of things in your opinion?
Paper is generally not susceptible to malware or other ways passwords can leak from a local or hosted password manager.
Convenience vs security.
The balance i struck with a self hosted instance of bitwarden has been good for me.
I run it.
It’s open source
It’s third party audited
Company has a good history generating trust
Did I mention I host it?
Because if you don't use one, you'll almost certainly instead either reuse passwords across sites, store passwords insecurely, or choose weak passwords.
In my opinion, storing passwords in encrypted files is probably safer than putting passwords in a centralized location (provided you don't code your own encryption algo or make other silly mistakes). There is not a lot of value in trying to attack a single person's password file, but the value is multiplied by the number of users when using a centralized platform.
That is too hard or tedious for most people. Syncing is a pain, and doesn't autofill on websites or in apps.
If you have an application that you trust (be it track record, inspection or known-good controls), and that application happens to also be a password manager, then the trust in the manager itself should be fine. If, however, you use a third party service, i.e. something managed by a company that holds your data, that is a different topic because you're talking about trusting a company.
A password manager can be KeePass on your local FDE storage medium. A password manager can also be a web app hosted elsewhere. It can also be both. You can even mix it up and have the storage medium be remote storage in stead of local storage.
If you currently have a file called "passwords.txt" stored in a public S3 bucket, that would be your 'own method' but would that really be good? Or perhaps you have an RSA-wrapped AES-encrypted spreadsheet you store locally with no back-ups, also possible. Too many unknown parameters.
At the end of the day the solution that gets you strong unique passwords per entity in a way that you don't lose access to personally but also don't give unwanted access to towards third parties is better than not having a solution at all. (this includes physical paper password books, those are 'unhackable' after all)
However for important accounts, I use 2FA with yubikeys or codes that are not stored on 1password. Just in case.
Especially for non-tech family members and friends. Its either an easy password manager or using the same password everywhere.
There's no such thing as perfect security, but as a security-minded person I see nothing there to concern me simply because the data is stored in a company's S3 environment vs on Dropbox vs on my local disk. Presuming that the software itself has not been maliciously modified to leak the key, then regardless of where the data is stored it either requires breaking the encryption or finding the password that generated the key in order to access the data. My local disk is no more secure in that aspect, except that I may have the illusion of control. Availability is also an aspect of data security (in the CIA triangle) and a cloud provider that properly replicates and manages backups of data is more reliable than my local disk in this aspect and a fair trade-off for data I likely want to synchronize across systems and devices (phone and laptop, at minimum).
Why should you trust a password manager?
For me, it's pretty simple. I don't use social login, and I use unique usernames (most of the time) and passwords (every time) for hundreds of sites I've created accounts on over the years. This is because breaches /will/ happen, and password re-use is probably the single largest issue for user security, including for "power users" like myself. A password manager of /some kind/ is basically required to have unique passwords across hundreds to thousands of sites. Certainly, there's more to it, and you need to figure out your own threat model and trust constraints, and I can't solve that for you. But as far as I am concerned, if I have a reasonable assurance that the right algorithms are used and those algorithms are correctly implemented by the password manager software, I see no reason to distrust it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess password managers seem like one of those few decisions that made my life both more convenient and more secure (after the initial adoption). Out of curiosity, what could one use instead of a password manager that would be closer to the “more secure” side of things in your opinion?
You could use a different password for each service and just write them in a paper notebook. Paper is generally not susceptible to malware or other ways passwords can leak from a local or hosted password manager.
IMO it's strange that people use cloud-based password managers. Companies like 1Password have all your passwords in their cloud. So they are an enormous target. I use enpass, and am in charge of my own syncing and storing in the datastore of my choice. I personally prefer this model.
But they are end-to-end encrypted, so if someone broke into their database they would be useless unless they also had access to your device.