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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?

#51
post #24

I'd strongly advise against 1Password, several answers here recommending it and I suspect conflating personal use with 'good enough for business', hard disagree. Your company can apply various aspects of threat modelling and more often than not several companies I've worked with find that Bitwarden self-hosted can meet a lot of requirements, this is the best solution in terms of privacy and security and controlling y…

Why do you disagree 1password is good enough for business?

[deleted]

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

#52
post #13

- Use 1Password or similar password vault to deliver account passwords on day one; the password manager also promotes good personal password management practices - only share passwords for personal accounts; those accounts you terminate when the employee separates. For shared resources, use SSO and SCIM group management via the SSO provider to add and remove accounts from groups with different roles. Rippling seems l…

I wouldn't want HR in charge of my secrets management in any way shape or form.

Happy to have a level of group synchronisation out of HR's systems, but certainly would not give them the ability to manage the high-power users.

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

#53

KeePassX file in a repo with long password is a reasonably good solution. Not perfect, but open source and you can segregate by user/team. Also in a team there can be 1 person who has write/update duties and updates the passwords if there a shared ones (not the best approach). BTW, not related to the passwords is to put everything non-public serving behind a firewall and access it only via individual VPN keys.

Don't put in a place where history is saved (as in, don't put it in a repo, put on a shared disk). Also, make sure to rotate the key when people change.

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

#54
post #13

- Use 1Password or similar password vault to deliver account passwords on day one; the password manager also promotes good personal password management practices - only share passwords for personal accounts; those accounts you terminate when the employee separates. For shared resources, use SSO and SCIM group management via the SSO provider to add and remove accounts from groups with different roles. Rippling seems l…

I love 1Password. I use it personally, but at company level we use another.

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

#55
post #30

> We tend to have zillions of passwords in IT jobs right? Yes, but they should be unique to your account. I.e. via SSO. > What are the recommended ways to store and give access to passwords? Whenever possible, don't. Otherwise, it depends on the scale and security you need. A password manager is one possible solution. Another solution is something like Hashicorp's Vault or OpenBao. > How can a new hire be given acces…

> Yes, but they should be unique to your account. I.e. via SSO.

This is a great best practice, but user-based value metrics for many SaaS platforms make this untenable for some IT departments. If folks have to log in seldomly, it's very hard to make the business case to pay per user.

Similarly, there's many SaaS platforms that charge A LOT extra for SSO because you have to upgrade to their Enterprise-pricing model. If managing a separate user directory isn't worth it because the software isn't personalized, understaffed IT departments aren't going to do that either.

So while there is a best practice, dismissing solutions that are "good enough" (while sharing tradeoffs) isn't as helpful.

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

#56
post #30

> We tend to have zillions of passwords in IT jobs right? Yes, but they should be unique to your account. I.e. via SSO. > What are the recommended ways to store and give access to passwords? Whenever possible, don't. Otherwise, it depends on the scale and security you need. A password manager is one possible solution. Another solution is something like Hashicorp's Vault or OpenBao. > How can a new hire be given acces…

> Yes, but they should be unique to your account. I.e. via SSO. This is a great best practice, but user-based value metrics for many SaaS platforms make this untenable for some IT departments. If folks have to log in seldomly, it's very hard to make the business case to pay per user. Similarly, there's many SaaS platforms that charge A LOT extra for SSO because you have to upgrade to their Enterprise-pricing model. I…

Shared PWs are sometimes inevitable but then you must rotate them every time someone with access leaves the company. OneLogin also has a way to minimize handling of the shared passwords for auto-logins that depend on shared creds

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

#57
post #30

> We tend to have zillions of passwords in IT jobs right? Yes, but they should be unique to your account. I.e. via SSO. > What are the recommended ways to store and give access to passwords? Whenever possible, don't. Otherwise, it depends on the scale and security you need. A password manager is one possible solution. Another solution is something like Hashicorp's Vault or OpenBao. > How can a new hire be given acces…

SSO all the way (if you can). Chances are you've got Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 - both allow you to configure SAML based SSO into many SaaS apps either through their respective app galleries or some kind of custom configuration. Otherwise you could look at Okta, but be prepared to fork out serious cash. We use Entra ID (part of Microsoft 365) for SSO in our business, and it generally works well.

There'll be times that employees can't use SSO though. For that I'll add my voice to 1Password - it's well designed such that a breach of the 1PW service itself won't reveal credentials (you'd need peoples vault passwords and secret keys for that). Avoid Lastpass - the UI is awful, and they've been breached in the past.

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

#58
post #30

> We tend to have zillions of passwords in IT jobs right? Yes, but they should be unique to your account. I.e. via SSO. > What are the recommended ways to store and give access to passwords? Whenever possible, don't. Otherwise, it depends on the scale and security you need. A password manager is one possible solution. Another solution is something like Hashicorp's Vault or OpenBao. > How can a new hire be given acces…

> Yes, but they should be unique to your account. I.e. via SSO. This is a great best practice, but user-based value metrics for many SaaS platforms make this untenable for some IT departments. If folks have to log in seldomly, it's very hard to make the business case to pay per user. Similarly, there's many SaaS platforms that charge A LOT extra for SSO because you have to upgrade to their Enterprise-pricing model. I…

Is sharing accounts not against the TOS of any user priced saas company?

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

#60
post #44

I'd strongly advise against 1Password, several answers here recommending it and I suspect conflating personal use with 'good enough for business', hard disagree. Your company can apply various aspects of threat modelling and more often than not several companies I've worked with find that Bitwarden self-hosted can meet a lot of requirements, this is the best solution in terms of privacy and security and controlling y…

What makes Bitwarden better than 1Password for company use?

They mention self-hosted. Unless there's a long-game supply chain attack where they infiltrate the vendor and poison the updates and nobody notices until it's too late (that disaster scenario can always happen), at least not all your passwords are gone the minute the central server where everyone's data is stored gets compromised

I don't have much experience with either product but based on what the person said, that seems the most plausible reason to me. If 1Password does something like encrypting it for every user individually and so the server can't read the stored data (like when it's decrypted in the browser with the user's password, then an attacker would again need to compromise the website, wait, and hope nobody notices until their target logs in), then I guess GP really needs to clarify what they meant

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