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Bring Your Own Password Manager: Portable BitWarden on a Pi Zero

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Re: Bring Your Own Password Manager: Portable BitWarden on a Pi Zero

#51
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when there's more than you who uses the Keepass file and how do you store new passwords to the file when you create new accounts on the web (for various services)? What's the usage flow? Is there browser extension that allows you to interact with it without opening Keepass program? Maintenance you described is easy, but what about the actual usage and sharing passwords?

What's the use case for sharing passwords? I've never had the need to share one in 20+ years of being a power user. If I end up dead, my master password will be shared in my will with appropriate parties. > Is there browser extension that allows you to interact with it without opening Keepass program? I sure hope not.

> What's the use case for sharing passwords?

My wife and I have a number of accounts we share a single credential for. There are a surprising number of services we access as parents that don't have the concept of shared ownership of content on the server side.

I'd bet there are other use cases as well. Off the top of my head, Hello Fresh also doesn't allow more than one login to manage the same subscription.

Re: Bring Your Own Password Manager: Portable BitWarden on a Pi Zero

#52
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when there's more than you who uses the Keepass file and how do you store new passwords to the file when you create new accounts on the web (for various services)? What's the usage flow? Is there browser extension that allows you to interact with it without opening Keepass program? Maintenance you described is easy, but what about the actual usage and sharing passwords?

What's the use case for sharing passwords? I've never had the need to share one in 20+ years of being a power user. If I end up dead, my master password will be shared in my will with appropriate parties. > Is there browser extension that allows you to interact with it without opening Keepass program? I sure hope not.

Unless you live alone and have no family, there are all sorts of scenarios for sharing passwords.

Fedex/UPS only lets one account get detailed tracking numbers for an address, so I need to share my Fedex account. To check and pay my freeway tolls I'm only allowed a single account - so it gets shared. Plenty of people share all sorts of subscriptions, be they to Netflix, the New Yorker, or more. I need to share access to my insurance, to the utility bills, to sporting event tickets, to grocery store and pet food orders. On and on and on.

Re: Bring Your Own Password Manager: Portable BitWarden on a Pi Zero

#53
Something that's been on my mind for some time is the seeming inevitability of getting RCE'd by some innocuous application- web browser, chat app, videogame, whatever. These vluns keep popping up and eventually one might hit me. And if it does, it might come with something targeting keepass and _if_ it does I'm Fucked with an upper case F.

Building a portable terminal that can emulate a keyboard with a reasonable screen for ease of use seems like a fairly reasonable solution.

Re: Bring Your Own Password Manager: Portable BitWarden on a Pi Zero

#54
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when there's more than you who uses the Keepass file and how do you store new passwords to the file when you create new accounts on the web (for various services)? What's the usage flow? Is there browser extension that allows you to interact with it without opening Keepass program? Maintenance you described is easy, but what about the actual usage and sharing passwords?

What's the use case for sharing passwords? I've never had the need to share one in 20+ years of being a power user. If I end up dead, my master password will be shared in my will with appropriate parties. > Is there browser extension that allows you to interact with it without opening Keepass program? I sure hope not.

A use case isn't hard to imagine. You have a significant other whom you want to share credentials to some website with.

I have quite a few shared passwords in my "family" vault in Bitwarden. Utility websites (electric, gas, water, internet, etc), streaming services, banking, credit cards, mortgage, car payments, car insurance, Chewey (manage pet food auto ship), probably others.

Re: Bring Your Own Password Manager: Portable BitWarden on a Pi Zero

#55
post #32

That's such a tease. I check RPI-locator daily. Buying a Pi anything in the US is hard now.

I ended up getting some ROCK64 boards instead. They’re a great price One downside is the PoE hats are massive https://pine64.com/product/rock64-4gb-single-board-computer/

I got the waveshare ones for the pi 4 and they're really compact. Not sure if they would work with the rock64 though

Re: Bring Your Own Password Manager: Portable BitWarden on a Pi Zero

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Sincere question - AFAIK, Raspberry PI OS is a Linux distribution like any other, with dependency/distribution issues like any other. Why would using Docker on it be a sad state of affairs, in contrast to using it on any other distribution?

Because a password manager is a tiny piece of software. Instead, it is now a multi-component black box installation with a general purpose operating system running on a full-scale Linux machine with a containerization platform designed for datacenters. I am not a fan of this kind of redundancy and opaqueness.

Reminds me of someone writing a little status light app (in the macOS menu bar / windows tray) and choosing Electron for that. Something ridiculous like 200MB+ install size and 150MB memory use.

Re: Bring Your Own Password Manager: Portable BitWarden on a Pi Zero

#57
post #46
post #42

I've seen so many interesting password manager solutions over the years, but I have yet to move away from a Keepass file hosted on cloud storage. I can read and write to it using apps from every device I use: windows and linux PCs, iOS and Android devices. The file is versioned so accidentally clobbering it isn't a concern. There is zero maintenance, and if my home server goes down my passwords are unaffected. If I'm…

What happens when there's more than you who uses the Keepass file and how do you store new passwords to the file when you create new accounts on the web (for various services)? What's the usage flow? Is there browser extension that allows you to interact with it without opening Keepass program? Maintenance you described is easy, but what about the actual usage and sharing passwords?

Good questions and I think they show some of the blind spots I have.

I don't share my passwords database. Right now my wife and I do have a very limited number of shared accounts but I set up the same system for her and we simply duplicate the few shared logins we have in our two databases. This could be an issue if we need to share more.

Creating new accounts is easy. Both my windows and iOS Keepass clients open the file directly from cloud storage. They can save changes and reload the database on startup. Once in a while I've had conflicting writes but it's rare, and I stopped getting them when I got better about saving and closing after changes.

Usage flow on PC (I'm sure I could install a browser extension, but haven't bothered yet):

1. oh I need a password. windows+s, type keepass, open keepass, type master password.

2. ctrl+e look for the website I'm on

3. ctrl+b copy username, paste

4. ctrl+c copy password, paste

Usage flow on iOS:

1. oh I need a password. iOS magically knows, gives me options of iCloud keychain or Keepass client. Select Keepass client

2. Sometimes it's not smart enough to detect which password entry to use. In this case, type in the website/app name and select it

3. Usually it's smart enough to fill out the username & password fields automatically

Re: Bring Your Own Password Manager: Portable BitWarden on a Pi Zero

#58
Great write-up, thanks for sharing this!

One thing I would add: a self-signed certificate is not adequate for password transmission. In some ways, it's even worse than transmitting over clear-text http because it provides an illusion of security.

Any actor on your network can man-in-the-middle, provide their own certificate, and you'd be none the wiser.

I'd suggest provisioning LetsEncrypt leaf-node certificate on a node that can respond to HTTP-01 or DNS-01 challenges (don't open your home network to :80 :443 - use a VM in the Cloud to respond to challenges), then transfer the certificate to the Raspberry Pi. https://letsencrypt.org/docs/challenge-types/

Re: Bring Your Own Password Manager: Portable BitWarden on a Pi Zero

#60

That's such a tease. I check RPI-locator daily. Buying a Pi anything in the US is hard now.

I had some luck in the UK where rpi-locator only showed the main SKU, but the sellers had “kit” stock available with a case and charger for like £10 more, on a separate page.
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