So. I tried bitwarden for a while with 2fa. I absolutely did not realize that if you lose your 2fa you are done in that service. So yeah. Time to rebuild.
I’m attempting to go all in on proton stuff ATM. Drive, email, vpn and password manager.
What’s the easiest way to set everything up in a way that the whole system is safe and that minimizes the chance of me locking myself out ?
Stuff like. Do I bother with 2fa? What are yubikeys. Are these the answer? Do I 2fa all.accounts other than the protonmail one ?
Long single use case passwords or memorizable ones ?
Do I do throwaway emails or everything signs up to my main one ?
Sorry if I overloaded questions. But id love go get insight from people with more experience.
Edit. And oh. Threat model.
Id love yo not lose accounts if someone physically steals one of my devices.
I’d love to not get hsckdd online by someone random that is not targeting me specifically
And in broad strokes. I’d like to keep all my accounts as private as possible from private companies and governments. But im flexible on this one if its too much hassle.
-Use your password manager for everything. 16-20 digit randomized passwords for each account. Change the password to everything you care about and put it in Bitwarden. Don’t host your own instance of Bitwarden, unless you have really good backups. If things go wrong you’re fucked.
-Your master password should be 5-7 words strung together. Brand names, uncommon words, etc. Avoid dictionary words except for 1 or 2. Use random brands, not something you own that can be socially engineered. Write it down, work on memorizing it for a week or so, then throw it away.
-Use 2FA on Bitwarden. If you can afford it, buy 2 yubikeys. One for your car keys, and one for a safe place at home. Add both to your account as your only 2FA method. This way there is zero possibility of an online attack. The only way your account could be compromised (outside of a software vulnerability) is a highly-targeted in-person attack, in which case, you have way bigger things to worry about. If you can’t afford 2, than buy 1 and print out a Bitwarden 2FA backup code to store in a very safe place at home.
-This one is important: NEVER EVER USE SMS 2FA, too many things can go wrong (see: sim swapping). Pay the $10 a year for Bitwarden Premium and use the OTP 2FA codes. If a website doesn’t have OTP (most do nowadays, it’s usually labeled as the “authenticator app” option), than SMS is ok, just try to avoid it.
If you follow these instructions, I see no probable scenario in which you would have a breach caused by something on your end. A breach in Bitwarden (with it being FOSS and highly-audited, this is pretty unlikely) or, more likely, a breach in the service your account is using are the two scenarios you would realistically be breached.
Also, you’re very very unlikely to be locked out of Bitwarden as long as you keep 1 yubikey and/or a printed backup code in a safe space at all times. If you end up with brain damage and forget your password, you’d be fucked I guess, but if you’re that worried than write your password on paper in an obvious safe space. That definitely hurts your security though.
You could also fall for scams and/or social engineering, but that’s a topic way beyond the scope of this post.
It’s pretty important to remember that each device that you’ve installed the bitwarden client on has a local copy of your passwords, and you can always export your passwords too. So yeah, you need to have good backups in place if you self host vaultwarden, but I think it’s one of the lower risk services to run in terms of actually losing your data.
Yes good point, I forgot about that.