And Bitwarden permission change warning on brave browser Issue #1549 bitwarden/browser GitHub Now I don’t have to explain why this was bad on so many levels, those of course being (1) the change that was really unneeded, (2) was not optional and (3) caused users icon to disappear.
Two of the most common password keepers on the internet are Bitwarden and 1Password. Fortunately, both have very polished, well supported Brave extensions. If you haven’t checked out either service, be sure to sign up to either and install the appropriate Brave extension. I use Brave and I host my Bitwarden vault with rs docker and everything works fine. On a total of 4 computers with one of them with local ip set, and everything works and syncs fine. Bitwarden on Brave doesn't auto udpate and and auto save my passwords most of the times (90%). Sometimes it does (for example for metacritic i did auto save). I tried with Firefox and Edge and it's the same. Do you have a solution please? I see it's redundant problem. Bitwarden 2 for at least two logins, bitwarden 3 for at least three, etc. The Menu Title has to be an exact match to the text in the menu. Since bitwarden places the number of available logins for the current tab in square brackets, you need to add more than one entry to cover all cases.
Bitwarden Pricing
Bitwarden is free and open-source software, but unlike community-developed alternatives such as KeePass, it is a commercial venture.
The core product is free and will stay free forever, but you can support the developer by paying a very reasonable $10 per year subscription fee for a premium personal account. Premium users enjoy some cool (non-core) additional features, as outlined below.
In addition to a premium personal plan, Bitwarden offers family plans and a couple of enterprise plans aimed at businesses.
In this review, we will focus on personal plans.
What features does Bitwarden offer?
The following features are available to free users:
- End-to-end encryption (e2ee) of passwords
- 100% open source
- Cross-platform apps for all major platforms
- Browser add-ons for all major browsers
- Web browser access from anywhere
- Command-line tools (CLI) to write and execute scripts on your Bitwarden vault
- Can self-host
- Two-factor authentication (2FA)
Paying $10 a year adds:
- 1GB encrypted file storage
- Additional 2FA options
- Priority customer support
What is important to note is that there is no account recovery feature.
How easy is Bitwarden to use?
To start using Bitwarden, just download the app for your platform and sign-up in-app. A password is requested, but this is not verified. You’ll need to think of a strong master password, and can choose a hint to help you remember it.
And that’s it! Just don’t forget your master password!
The desktop clients
The Bitwarden desktop clients are basically identical in Windows, macOS, and Linux. Most versions of Linux are supported thanks to the app being packaged in the AppImage format. It is also available through the Ubuntu Software Center and, of course, you can compile the open-source code yourself.
We find the interface to be smart looking and very easy to use. Four “Types” of data entry are supported: login, card, identity, and secure note.
Each entry Type is formatted in a way suitable to entering data of that kind, and which the app can use to auto-fill passwords, web forms, and card detail forms. using browser add-ons.
An interesting new feature is a button in the password field which checks if the password you input has been exposed. This works much like our very own data breach tool and compares the username and password you enter with a database of known password breaches.
A more secure option than thinking up your own all-too-fallible passwords is to let the Bitwarden app generate secure passwords for you. These passwords can be tailored to conform with any specific requirements a website insists on.
You can also create folders and add items to them. What more do you want? If you need group password management and sharing features then these are provided by Bitwarden’s organization accounts.
Autofill functionality on the desktop is provided by browser add-ons for Firefox and Chrome.
The Mobile Apps
The mobile Android and iOS apps are very similar, and share the same attractive and intuitive design philosophy as their desktop siblings.
Both apps do everything their desktop siblings can including generate secure random passwords. They also both support fingerprint unlocking on devices which have fingerprint sensors.
The Androids app uses the Autofill Framework Service on Android 8+ devices and the Auto-fill Accessibility Service on older Android devices to auto-fill forms in any browser window or app. In addition to this, the browser add-ons work with the mobile versions of Firefox and Chrome.
In iOS 12+ the Bitwarden app integrates with Apple’s new Authentication Services framework to provide instant autofill functionality in most browsers and apps.
Web Vault
In addition to using apps, it is possible to access your passwords via the “Web Vault” from any browser. This is handy, although the possibility of compromised servers pushing malicious JavaScript code directly to your browser window means that using browser-based e2ee cryptography will never be quite as secure as performing the cryptography in a stand-alone client.
Interestingly, the only way to import data is via the Web Vault, which accepts files exported from a huge range of password managers
Command-line interface CLI
In addition to graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for all major platforms, Bitwarden provides a powerful CLI client for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
It doesn’t really do anything the GUI clients don’t, but it is very lightweight and geeks will love it!
Browser add-ons
Browser add-ons are available Chrome, Firefox, Vivaldi, Opera, Brave, and Microsoft Edge. A Firefox link is provided for the Tor Browser, but we do not recommend this as using any browser add-on with Tor Browser makes it more susceptible to browser fingerprinting.
The add-ons look like the Bitwarden apps and provide the same core functionally.
They also make auto-filling logins, forms, and suchlike a breeze.
Bitwarden customer support
An extensive help section provides detailed documentation on most aspects of Bitwarden. If you have any additional questions you can email them in.
Bitwarden is basically a one-man show, so all responses we received were from its developer Kyle Spearrin himself. Responses typically arrived on the same day. Alternatively, the Bitwarden website hosts an active forum on which Kyle is an enthusiast participant.
Privacy and security
Bitwarden is a US company and is therefore subject to FISA, the Patriot Act, and very likely surveillance by the NSA. Which shouldn’t matter because…
Bitwarden uses fully audited open-source end-to-end encryption (e2ee). Which is as good a guarantee that it is secure and private as it’s possible to get. The only way to decrypt your data is by using the correct master password, which is not recoverable should you forget it. So don’t.
Because e2ee is used, it shouldn’t matter that Bitwarden uses Microsoft Azure cloud servers to host accounts, although if this really bugs you then you can self-host on a home or rented server of your choice using the open-source Docker framework.
Audit
In November 2018 a crowdfunded independent security audit by Cure53 found no major issues with the software. Some non-critical issues were discovered, the most important of which were patched immediately. We can only presume that developer Kyle has been working hard this last year to fix any additional issues raised by the audit.
Technical security
Data at rest is protected using an AES-256 cipher. PBKDF2 is used to derive the encryption key from your master password, which is then salted and hashed using HMAC SHA256. These are all respected third-party cryptographic libraries.
Data in transit is protected by regular TLS - which is fine. Even if your data was somehow intercepted in transit (via a MitM attack using fake SSL certificates) it could not be accessed because it is encrypted with AES-256 before leaving your device.
In 2018 a flaw was found in the Chrome add-on’s cryptography. This was largely fixed immediately, although you should never use the ‘never forget’ option of Bitwarden if you do not want your encryption key to exist on disk.
Two-factor authentication (2FA)
Free users can secure their Bitwarden Vaults using a Time-based One-Time Password (TOTP) or email verification for two-factor authentication. Premium users can also use 2FA methods such as Duo, YubiKeys, and other FIDO U2F-compatible USB or NFC devices.
Check out our 'what is 2FA' page if you are new to this.
Final thoughts
Bitwarden is a free and open-source password manager that can go head-to-head with any of its closed- source subscription-based rivals. It is powerful, looks good, is intuitive to use, and syncs seamlessly across all your devices.
In our view, Bitwarden’s only real rival is the similarly open-source KeePass and its various forks. Bitwarden looks prettier than KeePass and is easier to set up and use, but thanks to the huge number of add-ons available to KeePass, it is no-where near as powerful or flexible.
KeePass is also true community-developed software rather than a one-man for-profit product (albeit one which is open-source). Bottom line: Bitwarden is the ideal password manager for the less technically minded.
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I wanted to write up a quick blog post on something that I was rather upset about. That’s a change that was very badly communicated and caused people to click things they shouldn’t have without verification, but because it’s a “web app” they seem to be able to do these things.
And here is that issue: Extension disabled due to new permissions · Issue #1548 · bitwarden/browser · GitHub
and Bitwarden permission change warning on brave browser · Issue #1549 · bitwarden/browser · GitHub
Now I don’t have to explain why this was bad on so many levels, those of course being (1) the change that was really unneeded, (2) was not optional and (3) caused users icon to disappear.
It’s also not the fact that, yes they made it easy as it only required a click, and did not require admin permissions, but guess what…. this is exactly how getting compromised works. So when you attempt to educate end users not to do that, and stuff like this applies that there’s nothing wrong with something like “accept permissions” out of the blue!
Now I’m going to share some comments I 100% agree with from those issues from a lad called cleclap:
“Bitwarden is a highly sensitive security application managing 100 and more passwords. It is not a good idea to have this application require additional permissions to communicate with other applications. I rather take this as a worrying indication that the development of Bitwarden is turning into a bad and sad and wrong direction.
And, yes, Bitwarden should definitely make this additional request for permissions optional.
Where can I download the old version of the extension? I do not want this extension to operate with more permissions than is necessary for the most fundamental options.”
Bitwarden Chrome Plugin
Now there’s a coupe dislikes and that could be due to the comment mentioned after by “github-account1111”
Brave Bitwarden Extension
“@clecap I agree with the premise, but if security is important, then using older versions is counterproductive, as it leads to a potentially less secure environment than with an up-to-date version (even one that has more permissions).”
Now I will put my two cents in right here…. It’d not the same to mix features in with security, updates to features almost never brings additional security, it’s usually the opposite and in this case it is.
As again cleclap explains:
“@github-account1111 absolutely yes – provided the updates move into the right direction. Here I have, sorry to say, some serious doubts. While I certainly understand the convenience of all kinds of additional UI features and while I am certainly grateful that they exist they (1) definitely should be optional, (2) trade convenience for security, (3) were not reasonably communicated to end users and (4) came as a “oops, my system has been hacked” surprise to me.
And therefore my trust that updates move into the right direction of more secure software is, here, shaken.
All I want from a password store is to keep my passwords safe – and communicating them to “cooperating programs” by means of some “click ok or have your password store disabled” is the textbook example of what I am not expecting from secure system design. Sorry.”
I again have to 100% agree with him here. Now for the response from the “officials”?
| Hi All, We’ve been discussing fervently today internally around this, and while we’ve figured out a way to make this permission optional in chromium based browsers, obviously we won’t be able to do so in Firefox. After deliberation and discussion, and before our official product release announcement, we’ve decided that it would be better to exclude Firefox from browser biometric authentication, for now, until the upstream issue is resolved: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1630415 rather than forcing all Firefox Bitwarden users to accept the new permission. Extension update will be published soon as we’re working on appropriate PRs to make this change, along with supporting documentation. Thank you for your feedback and continued support, patience and input, it’s extremely valuable and part of what makes open source amazing! Sincerely, |
Brave Bitwarden Android
OK? So…. because it couldn’t be optional on one platform it was worth the reduction in security for a bigger attack surface, so the feature was introduced “without say” to end users. That makes no sense when security should be the first and foremost from the product, not features.
How To Use Bitwarden
Final Words.
Brave Bitwarden Plugin
This feels like a upper management making a poor judgment call due to peer pressure and stepping outside of the company’s mission statement. What a sad day….