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Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

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Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#141

Post by imtringued »

kbelder wrote: post #100
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.

My house, several of my friends' houses, my insurance agent's office, my vet, all burned down in the same wildfire a few months ago. Local banks were destroyed along with everything stored in them, and we nearly lost our kids' school. Standing at the remains of my house, looking around at the destroyed community, it looks like we were firebombed. Not modern precision strikes... WWII scale, wrath of god, miles of dest…

What if you keep a digital backup in your car? The mobility of your car should spread the risk. If your house burns down during work hours your data will be safe.

Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#142

Post by isignal »

dsissitka wrote: post #42
itake wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You should be able to set a default username or email to automatically use when creating a new account. I think that might be a mobile limitation. Profiles address that problem but I'm not sure if Android or iOS give developers the ability to autofill profiles. Bitwarden's UX is pretty poor but the way I see it is that's what $12 a year gets me. :)

Agree the UX is poor but I prefer this because there are tradeoffs involved in some of these choices. Auto filling, for example, caused a bunch of critical bugs with LastPass. As an extension, there’s always going to be limitations that I’d prefer security software not push.

Natively integrated password managers like Firefox or Chrome are in a much better position to push for UX but you can see they aren’t that much better either.

Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#143

Post by cayleyh »

cmg wrote: post #68
BerislavLopac wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good approach, but it requires having a partner in the first place...

I downvoted this at first, but I've undone that and am going to respond. If you have family, extremely close friends (as adults, life-long friends), these can be options. Consider keeping your 'binder' in a safe deposit box and setting up access via your bank. If not, an attorney or even CPA may be able to keep this information for you.

An alternative is to have your attorney be responsible for executing your will, but keep everything else in the safe deposit box and put the instructions on how to access in the will. That way your attorney can access only if you die and they assume legal authority for exercising your will.

If you don't have anyone you will leave your assets to, the attorney will be the one liquidating your estate as per your will.

Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#144

Post by pbhjpbhj »

kbelder wrote: post #102
toomuchtodo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either on your keyring or in your fire safe. As I mentioned, if you lose it, you can get the lock drilled at the bank with sufficient ID. All trust waterfalls to meatspace trust providers, just like if you lose your Yubikey AWS support will reset your hardware 2FA with sufficient evidence you are you.

Just a note about safes... our community had a wildfire sweep through, and I have not heard of any fireproof safes actually working. Some were cracked open, or were so compromised they could be snapped apart by hand; some survived, but there were only ashes and melted metal at the bottom. I'm sure I didn't hear about the successes, only the failures, but still... I don't want people to proceed with the notion that th…

Fire address AFAIAA are rated by time normally, so they'll be rated to withstand a fire for an hour - giving time for the fire services to extinguish it. A safe that survives a whole house burning to the ground seems like almost an impossibility.

Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#145

Post by xref »

bronco21016 wrote: post #117
xref wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah I understand, I’m just saying in this case that feature would allow you to lock out your spouse effectively

Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#146

Post by folkrav »

dsissitka wrote: post #97
folkrav wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitwarden's UX is pretty poor Hmm, I've tried LastPass, Enpass, a handful of Keepass clients I can't remember the name of and (shortly) 1Password, and I can't really find anything Bitwarden does that much worse than any of these. To be perfectly honest, they're all kind of clunky, IMHO.

> ...and I can't really find anything Bitwarden does that much worse than any of these. I feel like I can think of a lot but I'll give you one that, to me, is Bitwarden in a nutshell: What happens if you open your browser, go to https://news.ycombinator.com/login , and hit Bitwarden's autofill shortcut? Nothing, because you didn't log in to Bitwarden first. Pretty much every other password manager will ask you to log…

Ah, I always use the toolbar button rather than the context menu shortcut, so it's a non-issue in my case, as it just will ask me to log-in there. Yeah, that would definitely be a better flow. Maybe I'm just "used" to it and am overlooking some irritants, I don't know.

Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#147

Post by [deleted] »

folkrav wrote: post #146
dsissitka wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...and I can't really find anything Bitwarden does that much worse than any of these. I feel like I can think of a lot but I'll give you one that, to me, is Bitwarden in a nutshell: What happens if you open your browser, go to https://news.ycombinator.com/login , and hit Bitwarden's autofill shortcut? Nothing, because you didn't log in to Bitwarden first. Pretty much every other password manager will ask you to log…

Ah, I always use the toolbar button rather than the context menu shortcut, so it's a non-issue in my case, as it just will ask me to log-in there. Yeah, that would definitely be a better flow. Maybe I'm just "used" to it and am overlooking some irritants, I don't know.

[deleted]

Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#148

Post by spiffytech »

legerdemain wrote: post #27
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…

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.

Home safes are available that are fireproof, waterproof, and very durable. Theft is an issue, though.

A bank safety deposit box is a good backup plan for the home binder.

The benefit of the binder over (or in addition to) the secret manager is it maximizes the chances your family can successfully access your data. I've designated family members as the emergency access contacts for my password manager, but one member completely forgot I even used a password manager, or what it was called. They would never have looked for my data there in an emergency.

Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#149

Post by cosmie »

xref wrote: post #145
bronco21016 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah I understand, I’m just saying in this case that feature would allow you to lock out your spouse effectively

Sounds like you can already do that with the "delete from org + recreate in personal" workflow, so an "unshare" button would just be streamlining that existing capability.

Re: Bitwarden releases “emergency access” feature

#150

Post by solstice »

jannes wrote: post #113
epse wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could generate parity files to guard against this. There was some discussion recently here about tools to do it. One example that is decent is https://github.com/brenthuisman/par2deep
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