- Millions of people use password managers. They make accessing online services and bank accounts easy and simplify credit card payments.
- Many providers promise absolute security – the data is said to be so encrypted that even the providers themselves cannot access it.
- However, researchers from ETH Zurich have shown that it is possible for hackers to view and even change passwords.
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Interesting paper and I agree with the researchers to consider full server compromise in scope for online password managers. Maybe I missed it, but I’d have liked a section on the response by vendors. Mistakes happen, but the response and actions taken are very important for (continued) trust in a vendor.
OMFG can people please fucking go away with this stupid “password managers are worthless” bullshit today. They are exactly as secure as promised, unless you went to the obviously shady ones that use web interfaces. People have been saying this for years, if you want security, keep your password manager offline.
So by that logic BitWarden is unsafe?
From the paper itself:
We had a video-conference and numerous email exchanges with Bitwarden. At the time of writing, they are well advanced in deploying mitigations for our attacks: BW01, BW03, BW11, BW12 were addressed, the minimum KDF iteration count for BW07 is now 5000, and their roadmap includes completely removing CBC-only encryption, enforcing per-item keys and changing the vault format for integrity. On 22.12.25 they shared with us a draft for a signed organisation membership scheme, which would resolve BW08 and BW09. At our request, to maintain anonymity, they have not yet credited us publicly for the disclosure, but plan to do so.
I didn’t look at the response to other Password managers, but the gist here is that the article is overblowing the paper by quite a bit and the majority of the “issues” discovered are either already fixed, or active design decisions.
I was also just looking for bitwarden information. Its just the best password manager and has never failed to do its job.
I dont know what they mean with less secure than promised. I didnt expect them to be perfect, and havent read that they promise no security flaws.
tl;dr:
- If the password manager server is hacked and compromised, then syncing your passwords with the compromised server will lead to compromised passwords (duh)
- None of the providers tested have (or have had in the past) compromised servers.
and an observation or two:
- Vaultwarden is free, self-hostable, and doesn’t rely on trust in a third party.
- Keepass (and its client variants, like KeepassXC which is pretty great) is even more secure because there is no server, just an encrypted file you can store anywhere.
Keepass (and its client variants, like KeepassXC which is pretty great) is even more secure because there is no server, just an encrypted file you can store anywhere.
And simultaneously less secure because it’s up to you to handle keeping your vault synced between various devices and most people are significantly worse at keeping systems secure than the professionals at the password managers.
Self hosting a server of some kind or using something like Keepass on a single device (with offline backups) is the most secure option, but as usual with security doing so trades significant convenience for security. For most people who are uninterested in making sure their servers are kept up to date week to week letting professionals handle it is the better option.
Sure, but at the end of the day even if you don’t update your vaultwarden server or you rely on an insecure storage sync system like dropbox, your actual vault is encrypted with a key that only you know. Even if your server is hacked or the kdbx is leaked, your passwords are safe until someone breaks AES.
Contrast that with hosted services, who could very easily attach their own keys to your encryption key (whether now or in the future at the behest of the state) and you’d be none the wiser. E2EE doesn’t matter much when the other end is controlled by someone else.
I’m not disagreeing that most people just want something to work without thinking about, and for that reason I’m glad that services like bitwarden and lastpass and protonpass exist. My intent was not FUD, just shining a light on the fact that keeping your passwords secure does not require trusting a company.
Hardware TOTP Authenticator & Password Manager SecureGen
Russian origin?
For people interested there were 3 cloud based password managers tested and this is what they found
The researchers demonstrated 12 attacks on Bitwarden, 7 on LastPass and 6 on Dashlane.
Unfortunately they don’t explain what the attacks were in the article. Gonna need to find the paper to know.
Is there a reason why these attacks were on cloud based pw managers?
That’s where most of the passwords are
The method, they use, requires a client-server architecture. Hence, they cannot attack a local keepass file even if you sync it to some cloud.
From what I scanned, there was no reason given on why they only attacked cloud based providers.
My guess is that these are paid ones and thus have a ‘market share’, easier to attack etc.
If you attack a ‘keepass’ password the attack vector is more crypto / memory based as far as my limited knowledge goes and not some funky inbetween attack.
Also, if you attack a cloud base provides, you will most likely have multiple victims per breach / exploit, whilst offline are targeted and thus not so interesting in most cases unless we’re talking about a person of interest
they ran the test on those pw managers because they were open source. that allowed the testers to implement a “dummy” provider on their own “compromised server.” so the results of failing the tests are based on the hypothetical situation of “what if bitwarden (or whoever) had an entire server taken over by hackers”. while the chances of that happening are greater than zero, it would take a lot for someone to completely hijack a server like that
edit to add-- these tests are one of the reasons these pw managers choose to be open source: to allow 3rd party tests like this to find vulnerabilities, so they can be fixed
nothing is 100% guaranteed safe, but if you don’t want to remember or write down dozens or hundreds of unique strong passwords, i still would recommend a pw manager
Oh okay so they probably delivered malicious code to the user entering their passwords… Well even an offline pw manager can be compromised in the code.
Yes but unfortunately nothing specific about the strength of any particular option.
Bitwarden have published a blog addressing this audit:
Copy pasting a comment that I saw on Reddit
——
Link to the original study (with a less sensationalized title):
A few important notes:
-
the study is about Bitwarden, LastPass, Dashlane and 1Password. Proton Pass isn’t mentioned.
-
the study presumes that they’re working with a malicious server (read this as compromised server, controlled by an attacker). The attacks they talk about in the article would not work on a normal server. Here’s their quote:
No need to panic: all of our attacks presume a malicious server. We have no reason to believe that the password manager vendors are currently malicious or compromised, and as long as things stay that way, your passwords are safe. That said, password managers are high-value targets, and breaches do happen.
- Here’s another quote, about other password managers:
You can ask your provider the following questions:
- Do you offer end-to-end encryption? What security do you provide in case your server infrastructure were to be compromised?
- How do you check that public keys and public-key ciphertexts are authentic?
- How do you authenticate security-critical settings, such as the KDF type and the iteration count?
- Do you provide integrity guarantees for a user’s vault as a whole? Can a malicious server add items to your vault?
You can also ask your favourite password manager to commission an audit checking for our attacks in their products.
- If you still feel unsure/unsafe, then adopt an offline password manager (I highly recommend keepassXC).
Wish they did an assessment on Proton pass. I just started using all proton services and wanted to know how that holds up. My company uses Bitwarden 🙃
I too recommend KeepassXC, works even on android with KeepassDX. I use syncthing to sync between devices (work, personal and android)
I also use KeepassXC, and it’s great. I’m interested in setting up Syncthing between my Android, Linux desktop, and NAS. Do you have any tips or articles/resources that you used to set it up?
Hmm, I don’t think I’ve optimized it either to be fair. I wanted to use my phone as a ‘bridge in between’ but that means it uses battery since it ‘checks’ whats online.
In reality my phone is usually on demand and since I work from home, my work device is usually still turned on when I turn on my ‘good computer’ with fun projects.
One thing that I find useful is the backup / version control settings, I’ve set it up that there is a version control if it overwrites things so that when conflicts happen (eg a sync didn’t happen and I changed both keepass databases) I can quickly ‘merge’ them or sync them up manually.
I’ve also heard that syncthing isn’t available on android anymore but a fork (that is somewhat vetted, iirc) exist.
If you can run applications on your NAS & connect to it from anywhere, it could be used as a type of ‘master’ server that keeps everything in sync that is always online.
Is your data in KeePass encrypted?
Yes, it’s encrypted. Wouldn’t be much of a point if it was just plaintext.
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It’s not better to use 2FA with the same password than using a password manager?
I was always (and still am) under the assumption that you are fucked anyway, if either endpoint is compromised.
Sure, you can do a lot to make it less and less comfortable to read a password. But I’m not convinced that it is possible to. Fully prevent it from happening, no matter how hard you try.
the paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/058.pdf
Assume the breach - that includes your password manager host. Especially your password manager host.
The summary is here; the linked article is a bit short on detail. https://zkae.io/
I read the summary but haven’t gotten into the details on each. It is concerning that Bitwarden has so many issues, as it’s the only one that is offered as a self hosted solution in addition to SaaS - I do think it’s unlikely for a home lab to get the kind of attention that would result in using these methods against the vault, but it’s possible. Attackers have been known to go after admins. Lastpass has had their run ins with breaches before and shouldn’t score so highly. 1Password seems to have good architecture and a responsive team.
