I think being unreliable is not accurate. I’m doing the whole password manager thing in what can be only described as the most unreliable way, by self hosting it, and so far I literally haven’t had any downtime (touch wood).
Even with LastPass being compromised, the database itself was still encrypted and the only way in would be to guess your master password. If you have even a half decent master password, that should be plenty of time for you to have both changed your passwords, and ideally changed password managers at that point.
I really don’t agree with recommending just remembering passwords in your head, because we’re all human and we’re bound to be lazy and start reusing passwords for certain services. And sometimes, you might have no choice but to be signed up to all different things. Even just the bare essentials for me would be email, my bank account, my superannuation, my local government account, my work password, my laptop password. That’s too many passwords for me to keep track of and I know that.
If I were you, based on what you’re saying, I’d probably recommend to you a local password manager that just uses a local vault, like KeePass-compatible managers, because you’re entirely managing where your passwords are and how securely they’re stored, and they’re not open to the internet. I used to have this setup, but found it ultimately difficult to keep the database in sync on all my different devices (2 laptops, desktop, 2 phones, and tablet).
If I were to list devices under my control both at home and at work, it’d come as massive flex, since I work as corporate sysadmin and that’s only my most recent job.
So, rather than that, let me just say that if you happen to find such small environment difficult to control, password-wise, you’re approaching the problem wrong.
Invest in very simple mnemonic solutions (which is just a fancy name for reducing seemingly complex memory tasks to trivialities), learn about patterns and password’s entropy, and do remember, that:
Currently (non quantum-computing freely available), @2@JustARegularNerd@2@ is as good password as NDuknn#$83!$%, since they both will take ridiculous amount of time to break raw and an attempt to break it will activate safety procedures in every reasonable online service there is. The former is a trivial thing to remember, since it uses your nickname and @2@ string. Here, you can test both for predicted time to break.
Relying on third party software solutions, especially closed-software for security is always risky, no matter what the developer(s) behind it claims, and no matter how professional it looks like. There are leaks and account takeovers all the time, businesses are being sold, or turn out to be run by crooked characters, governments force the “bastions of freedom” to kneel, and they do kneel.
I think being unreliable is not accurate. I’m doing the whole password manager thing in what can be only described as the most unreliable way, by self hosting it, and so far I literally haven’t had any downtime (touch wood).
Even with LastPass being compromised, the database itself was still encrypted and the only way in would be to guess your master password. If you have even a half decent master password, that should be plenty of time for you to have both changed your passwords, and ideally changed password managers at that point.
I really don’t agree with recommending just remembering passwords in your head, because we’re all human and we’re bound to be lazy and start reusing passwords for certain services. And sometimes, you might have no choice but to be signed up to all different things. Even just the bare essentials for me would be email, my bank account, my superannuation, my local government account, my work password, my laptop password. That’s too many passwords for me to keep track of and I know that.
If I were you, based on what you’re saying, I’d probably recommend to you a local password manager that just uses a local vault, like KeePass-compatible managers, because you’re entirely managing where your passwords are and how securely they’re stored, and they’re not open to the internet. I used to have this setup, but found it ultimately difficult to keep the database in sync on all my different devices (2 laptops, desktop, 2 phones, and tablet).
If I were to list devices under my control both at home and at work, it’d come as massive flex, since I work as corporate sysadmin and that’s only my most recent job. So, rather than that, let me just say that if you happen to find such small environment difficult to control, password-wise, you’re approaching the problem wrong.
Invest in very simple mnemonic solutions (which is just a fancy name for reducing seemingly complex memory tasks to trivialities), learn about patterns and password’s entropy, and do remember, that: