From a simple KeePass database to enterprise credential management solutions—what’s your setup at work?
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On a post-it note stuck to the monitor.
Keepass.
Backed up in the cloud, with a long password with plenty of non english characters in the password.
For learning new passwords, I write them down on a note in my wallet, without any explanation of where they lead or what username to use.
The same basically. For the real paranoid stuff I have the keepassx file in a veracrypt container.
We use ITGlue because it lets us tie password records to documentation which makes finding things very streamlined.
Personally, I use Bitwarden
correct horse battery staple
Always a relevant xkcd
I don’t understand the extreme love for Bitwarden. I understand it’s useful, but I want as few things with a webui and server instance as possible, especially passwords, the thing that should be most secure.
KeePass, vault saved into the user’s One Drive synced folder is sufficient. It’s secure, offline, and automatically makes backups. And migrates to the new system just by logging into One Drive.
Bitwarden and others worry me because they have a lot of exposed attack surface, comparatively, and require much more maintenance to keep secure imo. I don’t want to expose any of that to a portal or anything.
That said, I don’t hate Bitwarden, the bitwarden/vault warden software is incredibly solid for what it is.
https://bitwarden.com/help/cli/
If you’re concerned about security audits they do those regularly too
https://bitwarden.com/help/is-bitwarden-audited/
In addition to free as in source, they are respected because they have a high-quality, certified, third-party audited product.
Oh certainly. I just mean that in an extremely broad sense, Bitwarden adds 1 more threat vector by being an online service. As a metaphor, if presented with a safety deposit box in a bank, and a safety deposit box in a train station with CCTV, even if the latter is incredibly well defended it still carries more intrinsic risk by being accessible.
That’s all really. Bitwarden is great software. It being an online platform just has that inherent factor that a non-web solution doesn’t.
Aka, if there is a massive breach in webview or a critical fault in SSL cryptography, this can be exploited. And Bitwarden itself is an attack surface to exploit. But in an offline solution, the attack surface of a vault can only be exploited when you get back online, and somehow actively choose to expose this or have a breach. The reason I use onedrive for the work sync (privately I use syncthing) is it would take two massive simultaneous failures to have an exposure this way. The sync service would have to somehow expose the file to a bad actor, and the file itself would have to have an exploitable cryptographic flaw at the same time.
Which is why it’s third-party audited every year. It’s transparent for any issues rather than any other solution out there such as OneDrive that obfuscates completely.
Absolutely. Like I said: it’s great software and they are doing all they can to mitigate the inherent risk it faces because it is one of their biggest attack surfaces. They do great work.
I’m saying I would just rather decouple passwords, and online sync, into two entirely separate sandboxes. For my purposes, I don’t need to centrally assign or manage my users passwords from the top down, the manager is a tool for them to use as they like, and they can store PID in there as well, so I shouldn’t have access in principle. I can reset the accounts I control, but I cannot unlock or recover their vault.
For a web managed service, through no fault of their own, there is a high likelihood Bitwarden will one day be vulnerable to a browser engine based zeroday at one point or another. And I have no doubt they will rapidly patch this. But it’s a matter of time. And bad actors will be constantly attempting to break this quietly.
My only point is, even if onedrive, or GDrive, syncthing, etc, were vulnerable to a similar zeroday, it’s not enough to compromise an encrypted vault file because even if an exploit grants access to the file, the KeePass vault management is still entirely separate from all online portions of the interaction, and an entirely different and separate exploit would be needed to exploit the database file if it was obtained, as the vault is not managed in browser.
So there is a much greater chance for me to be notified of a onedrive or syncthing vulnerability, and have time to update the services in my vault contents just in case, well before a brute force attack could (potentially) open it.
This has its own drawbacks, as if they do exfiltrate the file, they can use infinite brute force attacks to break any vault with low enough entropy, but a vulnerability in Bitwarden could expose similar if a bad actor managed to dump the contents.
There is no perfect solution, period. I just wager it’s less likely for two zero day exploits to overlap perfectly like that on both my enterprise file sync software and my publically unlisted, undocumented, and otherwise undetectable KeePass Vault file stored in an arbitrary location with an arbitrary name and extension.
OneDrive
offline
…shoukd we tell them?
You can access it offline.
I do not mean to imply the One Drive is offline. It’s the syncing backend.
But if your internet is out, you can still open your vault and look up a router password, for example, because the vault is a file on your local machine.
The actual answer will always be convenience. It’s just too easy to be able to smack my thumb on the fingerprint sensor to login to just about anything.
I understand your point on security, but for the masses, it needs to be as frictionless as possible.
And getting someone to use BW over nothing is a massive improvement even if it’s not perfect.
This is incredibly true. The ease of use I will admit got me to use other password managers in the past before I rethought my approach maybe 7 years ago. And any manager is better than the spreadsheet users will implement if we dont give them tools.
We use Netwrix Password Secure at work. They just announced this week they have found a RCE vulnerability in their software…
Bitwarden/KeePass for MFA (not SMS or email) protected accounts. Pen and paper stored in a fire proof vault for non-MFA and break glass accounts.
Scribbled on the whiteboard in the office.
jk
I would never scribble my password on a whiteboard. It’s important to write in large clear letters so I can read it from across the lab.
As an admin for a Linux server, I want to institute a ssh pub key expiration policy for all the users and enforce non-reuse of old keys. Does anyone have a best solution for this?
How do you do your pubkey deployments? If you use ansible, it should be simple enough.
Sounds like certificates to me, but I don’t know of any such solution
Edit: I found out that openssh allows the logon with a certificate. This guide shows how to setup a public key that expires after 52 weeks.
Used Keeper at my last gig. Was pretty happy with it all in all. Lacking some admin features, rock and roll support. Not too pricey, but it is per-user/per-month. Played nicely with our Google auth.
The method of champions. Post-it on the bottom of keyboard.
Got a thrift store keyboard. The pink sticky on the bottom said:
User: admin
Pass: password
I wish I was joking. Someone out there was dumb enough to need a reminder on that one.
I would need a small book hidden under my keyboard. My work password safe has approximately 100 entries.
Bottom of keyboard? Are you out of space on your monitor to place additional Post-its with user credentials on them? /s
Boss, I need a third monitor, I’m out of space for post-its
Monitor bezel is for the less secure systems. Under the keyboard is for the secure stuff.
And the really secure systems are in the filing cabinet.
Bitwarden self-hosted with vaultwarden on my Hetzner VPS
Personally, 1Password, but their enshittifaction is serious.
Work, Password Safe. But we’re moving to CyberArk.
I’ve been using 1password for over a decade. I’d love to know more about the enshitification you’re seeing.
I just looked back and my first vault item dates back to 2010. Time flies.
I think enshittification is slightly an overstatement. They’re under VC pressure now and moving aggressively towards a subscription model with capabilities increasingly behind the subscription. I bought a few licenses for Mac and PC a while ago; the software still works but no browser extensions - need a subscription for that. Also, take a look at their job postings. Same job pays double in USA vs Canada. Funny way to do things if they’re Canadian.
Thanks for a great response. I’ve been a paying customer for ages, and added my family as well. So I don’t have the paywall issues you’re seeing.
Why do companies name their password safe “Password Safe”? Thats about as relevant as naming a phone “Phone”.
It was a password safe before password safes were cool. https://www.pwsafe.org/2002.shtml
Thank you for clarifying!
I clicked the button to make a link but it didn’t work. :)
Markdown formatting can be tricky
See the Nothing Phone (2a)
Or this obscure device confusingly named iPhone
Keepass
Keepass x2
At work I keep them in onenote (they are encoded) because they won’t let us install an actual password manager and half the shit I log into doesn’t support SSO/doesn’t have it set up and is all on different password schemes. Our service account passwords are in a shared cyberark vault.
