Password managers

Do you use a password manager? If so, which one? If not, why not?

  • Yes
  • No, not planning to
  • No, but planning to

0 voters

Me personally, I used LastPass for several years, but after they got bought out and the quality of their apps crumbled, I switched to 1Password and have been happy with them since.

I use KeePass for my most sensitive stuff, that I don’t want to entrust to cloud services – mostly financial account passwords and 2FA backup codes. I use Chrome for all other passwords.

Is Chrome the only browser you use, then?

Pretty much, yeah. More specifically, it’s the only one I use for sites that require passwords. I’m an Android user, so its a convenient browser to use for my phone life.

A bug in one of the Haskell documentation sites, that only affects Chrome, has forced me to read the docs in Firefox though. Also, Firefox has a built in picture-in-picture video player, which I sometimes find useful.

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1Password for the win…

I personally use LastPass and for work BitWarden. I think they have since sorted out their issues and are back to being decent(imo). I have heard of the hype with 1Password but still haven’t had a reason to switch yet.

This is probably something I need to research more but are there downsides to using browser password managers like Chrome??

A helpful tip for those who are ‘I don’t want to store all my passwords in one basket’…

You can choose to create a magic phrase for yourself which you append to each password you have. This magic phrase will not be stored in your password manager but will be provided by you after the password manager has filled your credentials in.

The limitations to this is password managers don’t support this out-of-the-box so you’d have to manually remove the magic phrase from the stored password if yours saves automatically. I was genuinely looking for an Open source password manager where I could implement a functionality to handle this but have been unsuccessful so far

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Given that I use Chrome across all of my platforms and devices, I haven’t experienced any disadvantages. But then again, I don’t have a long list of requirements – I mainly just want it to generate passwords, securely store them in the cloud, and provide them to websites and apps that request them, in as few clicks as possible. It does this well almost all of the time (there have been occasions where I’ve had to log in to the password manager and copy a password or manually change it, but this is very rare). It doesn’t allow me to customise the password generation, but when I want more secure passwords, I can just generate them in another application, and Chrome will still offer to save them.

While a browser-based manager is infinitely preferable to none at all, dedicated PM apps tend to offer more security and functionality, e.g.

  1. Separation from your Google/Chrome account. If that gets hacked, then the attacker has immediate access to all your passwords.
  2. Stronger encryption. You’ll often see stronger protocols utilised by dedicated managers.
  3. Access control. You have to log in to access your passwords, can enable software- or hardware-based MFA and have more control over session expiry.
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