That’s fair but it’s also one of the biggest selling points for me. The isolation it provides is one of the reasons I’d rather ran applications in Flatpak (if possible).

For browser, there is a webapp that can be selfhosted. See here https://github.com/logseq/logseq/blob/master/docs/docker-web-app-guide.md

I think you need chromium browsers due to the API they use, but it should work.

Many encryption algorithms rely on the assumption that the factorizations of numbers in prime numbers has an exponential cost and not a polynomial cost (I.e. is a NP problem and not P, and we don’t know if P != NP although many would bet on it). Whether there are infinite prime numbers or not is really irrelevant in the context you are mentioning, because encryption relies on factorizing finite numbers of relatively fixed sizes.

The problem is that for big numbers like n=p*q (where p and q are both prime) it’s expensive to recover p and q given n.

Note that actually more modern ciphers don’t rely on this (like elliptic curve crypto).

Every point can be supported with an analogy bad enough

Yep, my partner gave one for my birthday, it’s basically plug-and-play. It can automatically harvest credentials, spoof captive portals, etc. I bet that in most places nobody would question something like this hanging on the ceiling indeed.

Just FYI https://shop.hak5.org/products/wifi-pineapple. There are ready-made devices that can do basically what you are describing!

Encrypted DNS doesn’t solve everything. Handshake for TLS sessions is still in clear, you can usually see the SNI, and since we are talking about Wireless, usually this data is available to anybody who is in the vicinity, not just the network owner. This already means that you can see what sites someone is visiting, more or less. TLS 1.3 can mitigate some of this (for those who implement ESNI, but you don’t know that beforehand). Also TLS works until the user is not accepting invalid certificates prompts (HSTS doesn’t work for everything) and there are still tons of HTTP-based redirect (check mailing newsletters and see how many first send you to an HTTP site, for example) that can be used for MiTM attacks.

A VPN moves the trust to a single provider that you can choose, which is much better than trusting every single WiFi network you can attach to and the people connected to it, I would say.

Also if you pay for the VPN (I pay Proton), it’s not true that the company business is based on user data, they are based on subscriptions.

That app doesn’t work as it needs some play API which I guess is not implemented in microG. I am guessing not all of them are passed though.

My FP3 on /e/OS (based on lineage) has native recording. The phone passes safetynet check, i believe due to microG. However, some apps consider the bootloader unlocked so YMMV.

Looking at keepassXC doc I couldn’t find such setup. Maybe it’s possible, but maybe it also leads to trouble down the road. The “official way” seems to use cloud storage.

You keep saying external server for syncthing, but again: syncthing does direct data transfers, encrypted end to end, between devices.

I mention that but with a specific context.

• people with certain ISPs will need to use the relay transfer feature because direct connections can’t be established. Similarly, if you work in an office and you use the corporate network, you usually can’t have device-to-device working (can be both from a technical POV and from a policy POV).
• even with 0 data transfers, servers still have some trust in establishing your direct connections. I know that syncthing uses keys to establish connections, but that’s why I mentioned CVEs. If there is one, your sync connection could be hijacked and sent elsewhere. It’s a theoretical case, I don’t think it’s very likely, but it’s possible. The moment you have a server doing anything, you are extending trust.

In those cases then yes, you are extending a bare minimum trust, and you fully encrypted data would temporarily pass on the relay’s RAM

And from my (consumer) PoV this is functionally equivalent to have the data stored on a server. It might not be all the data (at once), it might be that nobody dumps the memory, but I still need to assume that the encrypted data can be disclosed. Exactly the same assumption that should be made if you use bitwarden server.

If this makes you paranoid

Personally it doesn’t. As I said earlier, it’s way more likely that your entire vault can be taken away by compromising your end device, than a sophisticated attack that captures encrypted data. Even in this case, these tools are built to resist to that exact risk, so I am not really worried. However, if someone is worried about this in the case of bitwarden (there is a server, hence your data can be disclosed), then they should be worried also of these corner cases.

I just get nothing from Bitwarden that syncthing and KeePass don’t offer more easily.

You can say many things, but that keepass + syncthing is easier is not one of them. It’s a bespoke configuration that needs to be repeated for each device, involving two tools. bitwarden (especially if you use the managed service) works out of the box, for all your devices with 0 setup + offers all features that keepass doesn’t have (I mentioned a few, maybe you don’t need them, but they exist).

I don’t know how or why you would have vault conflicts, but it really does sound like something fixable

At the time I did not use syncthing, I just used Drive (2014-2017 I think), and it was extremely annoying. The thing is, I don’t want to think about how to sync my password across devices, and since I moved to bitwarden I don’t have to. This way I don’t need to think about it, and also my whole family doesn’t have to. Win-win.

That said, if you are happy with your setup, more power to you. I like keepass, I love syncthing, I have nothing against either of them. I just came here to say that sometimes people overblow the risk of a server when it comes to a password manager. Good, audited code + good crypto standards means that the added risk is mininal. If you get convenience/features, it’s a win.

Agree on the versioning issue. In fact I mentioned that the issue is convenience here. It is also data corruption, but you probably are aware of that if you setup something like this. Manually merging changes is extremely annoying and eventually you end up forgetting it to do it, and you will discover it when you need to login sometime in the future (I used keepass for years in the past, this was constantly an issue for me). With any natively sync’d application this is not a problem at all. Hence +1 for convenience to bitwarden.

However KeePassXC’s sync feature does sync the vault.

How does it work though? From this I see you need to store the database in a cloud storage basically.

For mobile I just give syncthing full permission to run in the background and have never had issues with the syncing on the folders I designate.

I use this method for my notes (logseq). Never had synchronization problem, but a lot of battery drain if I let syncthing running in the background.

Nothing else passes through it unless you opt into using relaying in case you have NAT issues.

I guess this can be very common or even always the case for people using some ISPs. In general though, you are right. There is of course still the overall risk of compromise/CVEs etc. that can lead to your (encrypted) data being sent elsewhere, but if all your devices can establish direct connections between each other, your (encrypted) data is less exposed than using a fixed server.

If you are paranoid, the software is open source and you can host your own relays privately,

This would also defeat basically all the advantages of using keepass (and family) vs bitwarden. You would still have your data in an external server, you still need to manage a service (comparable to vaultwarden), and you don’t get all the extra benefits on bitwarden (like multi-user support etc.).

To be honest I don’t personally think that the disclosure of a password manager encrypted data is a big deal. As long as a proper password is used, and modern ciphers are used, even offline decryption is not going to be feasible, especially for the kind of people going after my passwords. Besides, for most people the risk of their client device(s) being compromised and their vault being accessible (encrypted) is in my opinion way higher than -say- Bitwarden cloud being compromised (the managed one). This means that for me there are no serious reasons to use something like keepass (anymore) and lose all the convenience that bitwarden gives. However, risk perception is personal ultimately.

Few reasons, with the most important being convenience. Syncthing is going to see just a binary blob as the password storage is encrypted. This means it is impossible for syncthing to do proper synchronization of items inside the vault. Generally this is not a problem, but it is if you happen to edit the vault on multiple devices and somehow syncthing didn’t sync yet the changes (this is quite common for me on android, where syncthing would drain the battery quite quickly if it’s always actively working). For bitwarden on the other hand the sync happens within the context of the application, so you can have easy n-way merge of changes because its change is part of a change set with time etc.

Besides that, the moment you use syncthing from a threat model point of view, you are essentially in the same situation: you have a server (in case of syncthing - servers) that sees your encrypted password data. That’s exactly what bitwarden clients do, as the server only has access to encrypted data, the clients do the heavy lifting. If the bitwarden server is too much of a risk, then you should worry also of the (random, public, owned by anybody) servers for syncthing that see your traffic.

Keeshare from my understanding does use hosting, it uses cloud storage as a cloud backend for stateful data (Gdrive, Dropbox etc.), so it’s not very different. The only difference would be if you use your private storage (say, Synology Drive), but then you could use the same device to run the bit/vaultwarden server, so that’s the same once again.

The thing is, from a higher level point of view the security model can only be one of a handful of cases:

• the password data only remains local
• the password data is sync’d with device-to-device (e.g. ssh) connections
• the password data is sync’d using an external connection that acts as a bridge or as a stateful storage, where all the clients connect to.

The more you go down in the list, the more you get convenience but you introduce a bit of risk. Tl;Dr keepass with keyshare/syncthing has the same risks (or more) than a Bitwarden setup with bitwarden server.

In addition to all the above, bitwarden UX is I would say more developed, it has a better browser plugin, nice additional tools and other convenience features that are nice bonuses. It also allows me to have all my family using a password manager (including my tech illiterate mom), without them having to figure out anything, with the ability to share items, perform emergency accesses etc.

Edit: I can’t imagine this comment to be deemed off topic, so if someone downvoted simply to express disagreement, please feel free to correct or dispute what I wrote, as it would certainly make for an interesting conversation! Cheers

I can’t really make an exhaustive comparison. I think k3s was a little too opinionated for my taste, with lots of rancher logic in it (paths, ingress, etc.). K0s was a little more “bare”, and I had some trouble in the past with k3s with upgrading (encountered some error), while with k0s so far (about 2 years) I never had issues. k0s also has some ansible role that eases operations, I don’t know if now also k3s does. Either way, they are quite similar overall so if one is working for you, rest assured you are not missing out.

Yeah, but you don’t need anything besides the runtime with kubernetes. Podman is completely unnecessary since kubelet does the container orchestration based on Kubernetes control plane. Running podman is like running docker, unnecessary attack surface for an API that is not used by anybody (in Kubernetes).

I run k0s at home, FWIW, tried k3s too :)

Why would anybody use podman for k8s…containerd is the default for years.

Nobody talked about victims. I was just contesting your BS exaggeration. But I see you can only discuss in absolutes and you decided to simply ignore every single point I made and flip the table with all the cards.

You must be really unsure about your ideas if you can’t defend them at all.

YOU made it sound like reality is either you going around in complete peace and bliss without any danger whatsoever (man) or in complete terror with a deathly danger behind every corner (woman). Challenging this barbie view of the world is not aiming to flatten the differences (which I acknowledged since the beginning) between men and women.

So yeah, nice try but no. Maybe reflect on your position and admit you used an hyperbolic statement next time, I dunno, it might work better than strawmen and moving the goalpost.

Women fear for their safety around men in public, and rightfully so. Period. It’s so fucking bizarre that anyone would ever try to argue against this.

I am not. I am arguing against the fact that men don’t (need to) worry about their safety in public. It’s such a cartoonish way to think. You don’t worry, good for you!

The statistics you’re quoting (and likely making up, but I don’t care enough about this to look) aren’t really relevant, I’m talking about real women’s real life experience.

So one comment ago you were telling me to look at statistics, now it’s real life experience that matters.

BTW, just search and you will find data, for example https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/crime-and-justice/recorded-crime-victims/latest-release, https://www.statista.com/statistics/423245/us-violent-crime-victims-by-gender/ (which shows 2022 is essentially identical, but quite a gap in 2021), etc. Note that I am searching generic violent crimes. In terms of murders men are quite universally in higher number.

Again, talk to women. Or if you can’t do that, read what actual women have to say about this subject. Do you not value the opinions of women? Do you not believe them when they speak about their personal experiences?

This has nothing to do with my argument. I am not contesting women (need to) fear for their personal safety in public. If I were a woman there would be a host of additional things I would worry about. What I am contesting is the way you present this fact, as if the difference between men and women was a 0-100 difference, when it’s not.

I don’t really see the reason to make up bullshit exaggerations to drive a point that stands on its own without them. Women have to worry and do worry differently, both in terms of quality and quantity than men when they go in public. There are certain risks that in public are fairly irrelevant for men, which doesn’t mean “men have nothing to worry about”. There are also certain risks that are much smaller for women (e.g., getting into a fight in a bar because some dude’s ego was hurt and needs to assert being the alpha).

Why is it necessary for you to make a completely unrealistic assertion (which BTW disregards my opinion as man while talking about men, so “Do you not value the opinions of women? Do you not believe them when they speak about their personal experiences?” cit.) to support a very reasonable thesis? Do you think people can appreciate the safety issue for women only if they contrast it with a completely opposite (i.e., no issue at all) situation for what concerns men?

All the crimes I have mentioned are statistically way more likely than sexual assaults, a crime that notoriously happens mostly within one’s home. So what you just said seems to me completely in antithesis with the original message.

Also, I completely disagree with your assessment. I live in a perfectly safe city and country, but when I travel I sometimes also go in worse areas, and most importantly I don’t even know whether I am in a “bad neighborhood” or not, because I don’t know the place. Hence I worry for my personal safety, which is exactly what prompts for those basic measures that you listed (and more), such as not flashing wealth unnecessarily. You do this exactly because you are aware that man or not you can be victim of such crimes just as much. In fact, statistics show that men are more likely to be victims of violent crimes in general, so I am not really sure where your core thesis come from.

Also worrying is not being terrified, is understanding a risk exists and taking precautions. Either way, this idea that as a man you have nothing to worry about is completely idiotic.

Because robberies and mugging do not exist, because I should not worry about them or because they don’t happen to me as a man?

When men leave the house, the worst thing we walk around in fear of is ridicule and rejection.

Do you live in a cartoon? Seriously, this is complete nonsense. I worry about my personal safety very often, when an environment presents certain risks (e.g., getting robbed, mugged etc.). It’s true that I don’t generally fear to be sexually assaulted by a woman, but to say that men don’t (need to) worry about their personal safety is completely absurd.