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Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

bitwarden.com

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Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#111

Post by avereveard »

mc32 wrote: post #83
toomuchtodo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything should be documented. We have a binder with checklists that walk you through gaining access to everything the other partner might need in the event of death (email accounts, domain registrar, bank and brokerage accounts, auto/home/life insurance, ongoing recurring bills of all sorts). Bitwarden databases are exported to paper, 3 hole punched, and put in the binder on a schedule. Both partners get setup wit…

Not to spoil good ideas or be a negative Nancy... What is the process for revoking this access in the event of a less than amicable split between partners?

well it's a checklist to change ownership to a list of deeds, would work exactly the same way, with the except being that's it's a third party whom distributes property ownership among the partners and not a unilateral transfer from both to one.

Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#112

Post by avereveard »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #32
legerdemain wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an accident or disaster (house fire, flooding, earthquake, you name it), this binder will be gone. This binder should be in a secret manager.

Keep a copy in there if you want for convenience, I argue you’ll still want a paper backup somewhere. Opsec is hard, people are fallible. “What was the password?”, “Where’s the Yubikey?”, etc. These are not the failure scenarios you want to encounter during a tragedy (speaking from experience).

even for personal safety you need layers of backups. my phone recently lost all data after it botched it's own update, and restoring some key has been a true pain. I've a binder with almost all of the important authenticator tokens or relative recovery codes, but some bank application do the otp setup on their own app side channel and required a lot of paperwork and calls to get it fixed.

Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#113

Post by jannes »

epse wrote: post #104
danboarder wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think giving a USB key or login details with access info to your password manager to a trusted friend or family member might be preferable to having a paper binder that could be lost in a disaster situation.

You'd have to account for bit rot though

I recently looked at an old USB key that had some JPGs stored from ~5 years ago.

I was astonished to see that over 50% of the photos had some sort of bit rot that broke the JPG rendering. Many photos would display correctly at the top until the row where the damage occurs and then display grey for the remainder.

This definitely occurs more than you would think on USB keys.

Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#114

Post by Dylan16807 »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #67
pkage wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bank safety deposit box is probably a good option for backup, it's very unlikely that both your home and the bank will burn down at the same time.

Safety Deposit boxes are not trustworthy https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...

A pile of papers will probably survive a lot better than a valuable object, at least.

Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#115

Post by thefz »

Barrin92 wrote: post #18

Bitwarden is just fantastic. It's open source, the interface is clean, works fine on all platforms for me and pretty much everything is free. If the devs browse here, thanks for making it.

I like it so much I proposed it to my boss and we set it up at work. Small team, around 20 people, but even the non techs got up to speed with it with just a 20-minute explanation.

Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#116

Post by jannes »

alexanderh wrote: post #22
Barrin92 wrote: post #18

Bitwarden is just fantastic. It's open source, the interface is clean, works fine on all platforms for me and pretty much everything is free. If the devs browse here, thanks for making it.

How dependent is it on them as a service? If their website/service disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow, would I still have access to my passwords locally? I'm still hesitant to use any form of password management that relies on cloud services. I still like Keepass (with auto-updates disabled for security because their updater uses HTTP, of course), for my purposes. I can Sync my keepass file any number of…

Yes. Only the sync stops working when offline.

Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#117

Post by bronco21016 »

xref wrote: post #93
bronco21016 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun story about shared passwords in Bitwarden... I recently had to undo that process because I’m going through divorce. We aren’t at the point of severing everything yet but my ex took the liberty of using the shared Bitwarden passwords to sign into each of the utility (gas, electric, etc) accounts and change the passwords. Thus locking me out. I had resisted doing anything with the shared passwords prior to this bec…

That sucks though I’m not sure your story supports “the Bitwarden process for unsharing is broken”. If you could remove shared passwords from someone else’s vault wouldn’t that just leave _you_ with access, effectively locking out your spouse?

You can’t unshare them from the organization. Say you create an entry for Bank of America. You then later share that entry with the “Family” organization. That entry now forever lives with that organization unless you delete it and then make a new entry again in your personal vault.

A more user friendly approach would be for the entry’s ownership to always remain with the original creator and simply share that entry with the organization. You could then later revoke sharing the entry with others or the organization. This is how almost every other file sharing works.

I’m sure there are underlying issues, especially since the goal is for it to be cryptographically secure, it’s just not a very user friendly system and as I said it’s ultimately my own fault what happened to me.

Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#118

Post by avereveard »

ZackJ37 wrote: post #50
aunlead wrote: post #16

The pandemic has made me (re)evaluate how my family can get to my finances and online services. Such solutions can solve issues related to bank/trading account access and key documents but what about subscription services? All my subscription services from Netflix/Plex (less important) to VPN/Blackblaze (more important) are tied to my credit cards, which upon my untimely demise will be deactivated. My family will sur…

I actually put together a service that is focused on this issue called Fidelius Vaults ( https://www.fideliusvaults.com ). If you have a moment to look, I'd be curious to hear your feedback on whether it solves the problem you stated.

ah, I dabbled in a same idea, but before "guardians" I had another step, which was contacting the "vault" owner after "keyholder" requests and before "guardians" approval allowing for the owner to veto access if needed be, as another layer of authorization.

glad to see things like these are cropping up, there's a need for sure.

Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#119

Post by dastx »

ssklash wrote: post #79
dastx wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why I'm getting down-voted. It doesn't work in Firefox's private mode. Nearly 4 years after the issue was raised. It was completely dismissed as "something Mozilla needs to fix" on multiple occasions.

It works, but you need to right click the field you want to fill and mouse over to Bitwarden.

That works, but the right click menu only includes logins. In addition, if your vault is locked, you can't unlock it without switching to a normal window.

Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#120

Post by forcer »

itake wrote: post #26
Barrin92 wrote: post #18

Bitwarden is just fantastic. It's open source, the interface is clean, works fine on all platforms for me and pretty much everything is free. If the devs browse here, thanks for making it.

I have been using Bitwarden for over a year now and there are still tons of UX bugs that annoy me. In Firefox extension: 1. There is no memory. If you close the window, to copy the password, you have to re-search for the account to find the username. 2. If you open up bitwarden before the page is loaded, it says it can't find the password box to fill in. This is probably an extension limitation, but still annoying. i…

This memory issue is also driving me insane. Why its so hard to fix ?
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