1Password for Linux development preview
discussions.agilebits.com
discussions.agilebits.com
It’s one of those apps which has been made with proper craftsmanship and care, so while I’m not a Linux user, I’d have no problem recommending based solely on Agilebit’s reputation.
The Windows client is much better after the last major release, but it's never been as slick as the Mac version (the biggest wart now is the system tray/browser extension popup).
1Password X looks nice until you try and use it, and all the company reps on the forums are very argumentative about any feature request (look for the pushback they give about resizing their super-cramped browser extension popup—and the issues with hires screens stemming from how they built it, which assumes a fixed size).
I've also got a chip on my shoulder about the "feature" they added that showed the most recently used websites in the iOS app with no way to disable it (they finally allowed setting the number to zero months later). The reps on their forums all come off with this attitude of "this is the best way, and you're wrong if you don't like it" for just about every issue that comes up.
I like the app and will continue to use it, but if my main platform wasn't macOS/iOS I would have bailed long ago.
I've observed this as well and it's frustrating. Usability took a dive when the list view for entries was removed (in favor of the rich icon, column-based layout), having to manually check identically named entries to find one with the right username, but their support staff was seriously adamant about the feature not being worth the development effort because of how few people had used it. It got me looking for alternatives but I haven't switched away yet.
As a company we tend to keep future plans pretty close to the chest. There are sometimes things that we know we aren't going to do, and whenever possible I try to be up front about that rather than beating around the bush or giving false hope. List view is one example of this. The intention isn't to be argumentative, but rather to set expectations based on current plans.
- Ben, 1Password
Keepass XC may even be doing a better job at security. At least in some dimensions.
I think it would indeed be nice if 1password scrubbed sensitive data from memory, but not a complete deal breaker if it didn't. I do wonder if this could be more of a problem on 1passwordX, though.
[1]: not zero, but still
Is it? I've been using it for sometime as well but it seems like there is a lot of room for improvement. E.g:
- Support for unlocking via Watch ID on the Mac.
- Currently on iOS when searching for a password within an app, if a site prefix is included that doesn't match what's in 1Password the list will just show no results, with no way to navigate manually to the login. Instead, you have to close the app, open 1Password, and copy/paste the credentials back in. Typically the master password will have to be re-entered as well, despite touch ID being adequate a moment prior. Since it's rare to sign up via the web now for mobile apps, this is the most common scenario for me when using 1Password for apps on my phone (and occasionally websites as well).
- Improved UI/UX on mobile. Dashlane is way better in this regard. 1Password overemphasizes features I don't need like tags and favorites and has a pretty cluttered look in general.
I like the native Mac app and open/local vault format. (Dashlane by contrast has a very buggy desktop app and requires storing everything on their servers.) But I would jump at the chance to use an alternative with a simpler UI and better experience on mobile.
This won’t solve all your problems. It won’t even solve the problem you describe the first time you encounter it. Nor will it solve it for apps that fail to provide an INTENT URL. But hopefully it will make things a little easier.
Unless I'm mistaken, 1Password no longer ephemerally decrypts passwords as needed and only while used and then scrubs the memory. [1, old but still] The excuse, if I remember it, was that garbage collected languages made this challenging. Even so, there is some irony in them moving away from the temporary, one-at-a-time, scrubbed approach just before all of the side channel attacks that allowed leaking memory across processes became widespread.
[1] https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/02/21/password-manager...
This is one of the main reasons why the core of 1password was rewritten in Rust: https://support.1password.com/kb/201902a/
It’s robust software that does was it says on the box. I was initially reluctant to move out of my local vault but the online service has been impeccable.
Electron isn't necessarily bad, its primarly a matter of how good your implementation is.
I only use VSCode for workflows I am obliged to.
Microsoft's React Native team has benchmarks where Electron causes 300x performance drop versus React Native.
Speaking of it,
"Xbox app for PC gets speed boost, ditching Electron for React Native UWP"
https://www.windowscentral.com/xbox-app-pc-gets-speed-boost-...
I dream of the day that VSCode gets rebooted into React Native.
Because it's terrible. It's slow and ponderous. I have yet to use something built on it that wasn't awful, and that INCLUDES VSCode.
2. It encourages developers to ignore platform-specific design idioms and features.
As soon as this stops working and i'm forced to get a subscription i'm moving to another password manager though. So hopefully one time purchases will remain possible.
If Apple offered a more fully featured keychain I might just stay in their ecosystem.
Given Apple's track record, if you care about your passwords being portable, it's unlikely that you'll be able to use their keychain on Windows/Linux/Android even if they develop it further.
I also considered using KeepassXC and Strongbox on iOS, which is completely free (sync the database via iCloud.) KeepassXC's browser extensions are pretty bad though, hopefully that will change sometime soon.
If you want to keep costs low, Bitwarden is currently your best option i think.
Linux doesn't have a standard desktop environment or widget toolkit. Electron doesn't seem like a worse choice than the other options, and it's easy to find engineers who know how to work with it.
1Password doesn't just store passwords. It has a bunch of other features. It's a fairly complex app at this point. It also has fairly similar user experiences in Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android, and that's pretty hard to pull off. If Electron helps them accomplish that, that's fine.
Those are pretty good reasons not to use electron.
Because every Electron app is inconsistent with the rest of the desktop. I use a dark theme system-wide but Electron won't care [edit: 1Password has custom integration for GTK theme]. Honestly, this isn't something the developer of the app have to put years of research in (Slack for example). The toolkit is supposed to do the integration (GTK, Qt, [Cocoa?]) and clearly Electron doesn't care.
> Why not QT?
You tell me (assuming you're talking about Qt, not QuickTime)
> Electron doesn't seem like a worse choice than the other options
Not really. Its just that its lazier/cheaper to just get your web development team pretend to write a desktop app. I get it, business decisions need to factor cost into account and hence the choice. I understand when a business says "we just don't have the funds to use a proper app framework, please do with what we have for now". But instead everyone goes to pretend like Electron apps are perfect even though the reason it was chosen was almost completely based on cost.
In essence, the old "only X% of our users use platform Y, it's not worth it to make this feature/fix this bug for them" does not exist anymore with something like Electron, and while this is ultimately also a cost consideration, it does come with benefits for me as a user, especially if I'm on a minority platform.
PWAs and Web Widgets I can stand behind, Electron is just laziness at the expense of the user.
Yes, it is very obvious from the screenshot that it’s built on top of Electron [1].
GTK nor Qt have that type of UI elements, they are obviously HTML elements stylized with CSS.
Another hint is in the files contained inside the Debian package used during the Linux installation [2]:
root@3cb1637b3070:/# apt-get download 1password
root@3cb1637b3070:/# dpkg --extract 1password_0.8.0-22506_amd64.deb temp
root@3cb1637b3070:/# ls -lia ./temp/opt/1Password/
total 177900
661008 drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Aug 3 18:23 .
661007 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Aug 3 18:23 ..
661011 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 129796744 Aug 3 18:21 1password
661010 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1060 Aug 3 18:21 LICENSE.electron.txt
661023 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4710103 Aug 3 18:21 LICENSES.chromium.html
661021 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6322128 Aug 3 18:21 chrome-sandbox
661017 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 179981 Aug 3 18:21 chrome_100_percent.pak
661013 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 321151 Aug 3 18:21 chrome_200_percent.pak
661022 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10505952 Aug 3 18:21 icudtl.dat
661012 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 243992 Aug 3 18:21 libEGL.so
661014 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8948960 Aug 3 18:21 libGLESv2.so
661024 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3103488 Aug 3 18:21 libffmpeg.so
661020 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4488304 Aug 3 18:21 libvk_swiftshader.so
661018 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8483376 Aug 3 18:21 libvulkan.so
792826 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 3 18:23 locales
792824 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 3 18:23 resources/app.asar
661015 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4791423 Aug 3 18:21 resources.pak
661009 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 50592 Aug 3 18:21 snapshot_blob.bin
792821 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 3 18:23 swiftshader
661019 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 170903 Aug 3 18:21 v8_context_snapshot.bin
661016 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 107 Aug 3 18:21 vk_swiftshader_icd.json
[1] https://i.imgur.com/pGJ4Wvd.png
I love this. It was my first reaction when I used MS Teams ... shit, it's electron and the I got the horrible user experience as usual. And in MS Teams even the font and its rendering is hardcoded and the devs are refusing to do anything about this! So when I use MS Teams I need to look at blurry text.
EDIT: And they bundle libffmpeg.so too .... let's have a look at what version, though I guess 1password is not a good attack vendor as it'd be hard for the attacker to control input data, right.
Once you’ve decided that you want to make a GUI for something you’ve already made the choice to increase the weight considerably. Electron is still the best cross platform toolkit when you need browser support too.
Agree, just though it was too much for something simple as displaying logins/pass but looks like it has lots of features?
I switched to Keepass[2] initially, synchronised with NextCloud but it wasn't intuitive enough for everyone. We moved everyone to Bitwarden a few years ago using bitwarden_rs[3] and have never looked back.
[1] - https://medium.com/@kennwhite/who-moved-my-cheese-1password-...
[2] - https://keepassxc.org/
-The client is not open source
-the backend is not open source
-it’s not “a first class citizen” right away (the Windows port is by all accounts improving)
I’m not trying to put down your comment but to point out that when you have a fragmented platform that is difficult to develop for plus a community that is often hostile to closed source or less than perfect feature parity you are going to be relatively deprived of commercial offerings. This is why we see less Linux support broadly. Not that you personally should change your opinions.
Linux's main difference is that, with so few users, when their priorities are disrespected by Big Corporate, the populace sides with Big Corporate. Rather ironic; most of the priorities Linux users have are motivated by respecting the user's privacy, security, and freedom. It seems likely to me that its a thought process similar to why much of the downtrodden American middle-class sides with Republicans, despite rarely having their best interests in mind.
I use 1Password, and it's fine. But these complaints are legitimate. This is a closed-source security facing application from a company that has raised at-least $200,000,000, which at one time charged a large amount of up-front money ($60+) for their product, used dark patterns to drive customers to their subscription-based closed-source cloud product, then left the original users in the dust. AgileBits should have no-ones good will, and even as a 1Password user, I support anyone who uses this forum to discuss their move to alternatives.
This is very different from asking for a native UI or to use a core OS API, etc.
Again, it’s fine to ask for a radical business change or require it but the frequency of this as a demand does help explain why few companies go down this path.
(As for 1Password abandoning one time sales for subscriptions, to me this is a separate issue. One, it’s not news or part of the linked article, two it’s not particularly related to the Linux release, three it affects all platforms. However if you did try and relate it to this discussion I think their current business model is actually much more compatible with going open source than the old one. I don’t think they will do this but the bundling of storage with software that came with the subscription model offers a more economically viable path for open sourcing because their revenue is less dependent on being the software provider. You could argue it would actually help their sales by providing a fallback ecosystem that shows customer there is no lock in and by making it possible to audit the crypto used to ensure their infra is zero knowledge. I think even among Linux users only a small fraction want to run their own password servers. I know I don’t. But I think they would judge the risk of enabling a low rent low quality low cost turnkey competitor too high and frankly I would agree with them. I think an open core model could work where they keep the UI chrome closed but this will not satisfy the critics.)
(Also I’m a longtime 1Password user myself. I was VERY bummed by the change to subscriptions but I don’t find it as dark as you do. The product I paid $60 or whatever for many years ago still works fine; old vaults continue to function so we were not really “left in the dust.” When I moved to a subscription it was because I needed new capabilities. Sharing passwords and other secrets with other people chief among them. This is IMO worth the subscription cost. My main concern is security; I do not like having to trust their closed source crypto to keep my stuff secure on their server. One party with sensitive data and crucial code is excessive risk. However I do not want to stand up my own server. That is even worse. And all the open source alternatives would require me to do this for sync support. Which is a bit odd considering 1pw used to offer peer to peer WiFi sync. I guess this is too hard for any of the open source projects to offer.)
Also it's very easy to use proper crypto in the wrong way. How can I know this is not the case here?
If this story came out in 2015, I think the response would be a lot more favorable. At this point Bitwarden checks all those boxes and costs nothing, so it's hard to compete.
MacOS has higher barriers to entry than Linux if you want to be on their stores, these do not seem to be an issue for people to overcome.
Exporting 1Password to Bitwarden was a complete mess, attachments in items were not imported at all/deleted (you don't get a warning of this.)
Bitwarden is okay, but compared to 1Password they have a long way to go in my opinion.
And yes, trashcan is handy, but really not essential. You first need to make the mistake of deleting an account you wanted to keep, and then the site needs to lack a "forget your password" feature (which is already a trashcan).
A clean and fast UI, proper matching of (sub)domains, is something you use constantly. I cannot imagine they aren't more important to all/most users than the single item you mentioned.
1Password X, which is almost a must-use on Windows, also has desyncing issues.
So I guess if you don't mind the above and are on macOS, it's better.
The fact that it is Open Source code that has been professionally audited also gives me an extra level of assurance.
I loathe the 1Password Mini interface because it doesn't have editing and wish I could just default to something that does.
There's also a lot of polish issues. For instance, if you have your taskbar with tray on a secondary screen, it still renders the context menu on the primary. If they are different sizes it might do it offscreen.
https://1password.com/downloads/mac/
https://1password.com/downloads/windows/
I still use 1Password 6 with Dropbox to sync. Works great. If you have a license, you may have the wrong (new) version, or just need to activate it.
By hidden I meant the downloads page is only linked in the footer. All of the main 'Get Started' and 'Try Free for 30 Days' links funnel you into their subscription process. I thought signing into my account might help, but then realized I'm not able to do so in a 'legacy' account because I don't have a secret key.
What a confusing and hostile user experience to 'legacy' license purchasers. It's like they are trying to forget that we ever existed.
I dont think i will go back to 1Password.
However, I do pay for a password manager because I recognise their importance and view them in a slightly different, almost unique way. I'm not averse to paying for software and services online, too.
Software is moving away from the classic buy-model and into a subscription/rent based model.
Free/open software does not mean no-cost.
Realistically, which is more likely? 1) That 1Password gets breached and loses their customer information, or 2) that I install Bitwarden on my server, somebody discovers a hole in it, I don't hear about it for a while (or do but don't have time to update), and get all my passwords stolen?
For me, the second seems more likely, so I'm happy to stick with 1Password.
I expect they probably pay more attention to abnormal access than most self-hosted users would as well, so you'd actually know about a data leak faster so you could rotate your passwords.
Thankfully, it's open source so I'm sure someone with fix that soon ;)
I dislike subscriptions - not for the financial cost as such, but because I like to evaluate whether or not I want to pay for a given version or stay on the current version. I'm happy to pay for software that provides value to me, which 1Password does (and I did pay for the existing clients). The same applies to major version updates when they add value for me - though the reality is that my usage is very basic, and I am often happy with an older version of the same software for years, so subscriptions to support continued feature development feels like an unjustified lock-in to me.
I do subscribe to some services that have a significant backend/cloud-based component, but in the case of 1Password, I sync the vault via Dropbox, so a subscription instead of licence/upgrade based pricing feels completely inappropriate.
Since I am trying to move more of my computing to Linux, it looks like at some point I'll have to look for other options than 1Password, which is a shame :-(
I left 1PW a few years ago as I felt them pushing towards a subscription model. I've tried a bunch of other open-source options, this one is best. Gives you a nice self-hosted bitwarden install without the overhead (in particular .log bloat) of the main bitwarden repo. You also get 2FA which I feel is essential.
Last year I got tired of having to fidget with WineHQ config every time I updated something, and decided to pony up for the cloud-based subscription.
It was the best decision ever.
Not only solves the compatibility issues (obviously), but also gave me the ability of managing different vaults, selectively share passwords within within the family, and also having some nice additional features (e.g., wiping out devices before intl travel).
All things considered, more than worth the subscription price.
The only two things that I miss from the native version:
1) ability to attach files to an entry
2) the flexibility of doing bulk operations (e.g., selecting multiple entries).
I solved the latter running 1P under a Windows VM, but hoping this Linux native version will solve now. 1 down, 1 to go.
I do however disagree with charging for this kind of software (which to me is only a local client, since I do not use or care about their backend service) via a subscription, on principle.
I'm aware that from a purely financial point of view, this is not a rational argument to make. In fact, it gets more irrational because if I could pay for updates every time, I might end up accepting a scheme where I pay more in total over the lifetime of the product - depending on whether I pay for every major version, and how high each update is priced - and I would not be dissatisfied with that.
But it's not purely a financial argument, it's about the choice of what to pay for, and what not. Being able to evaluate each version on its own merits. Paying for the syncing feature separately (in my case: Dropbox).
Basically, this kind of subscription removes freedom of choice from the customer side, which is why I am ideologically opposed to it even when it works out cheaper in the end for me.
As an aside: I find the word "subscription" to be disingenuous for these, and only use it because it has come to be used by convention. Traditionally "subscriptions" in terms of physical goods meant you retain ownership of anything you received before cancelling. Cancel a magazine, you don't need to mail back all your old copies. I tend to think of software or media "subscriptions" as "renting access", not as "subscribing", and mostly avoid them.
This is a huge point - they're rentals, not subscriptions.
I blame cable TV "subscriptions"; in theory you can record cable programs and keep them forever (like a real subscription) but with internet TV "subscriptions" they make it very hard to do so. TiVo with a cable card will happily record HBO or Disney Channel, but it won't record HBO Max or Disney+.
Software, video streaming and game "subscriptions" should really be called rentals, because you lose access after you stop paying rent.
Apple could choose to implement actual subscriptions in their App Store. Basically you would get updates as long as you keep paying the subscription fee. Practically this would still be a rental though since Apple breaks its APIs every year.
This was the precise reason I switched to BitWarden 6 months ago, needed a solution where my passwords didn't leave my network.
You're right, 1Password for Linux integrates tightly with the 1password.com service and as such does not support local vaults.
I really don't want to store my passwords on your "servers", and I'm sure there are few others like me - not a majority. In our case BitWarden's idea of paying for a subcription (happy to do it), and hosting BitWarden in my own network - pretty close to local vaults in terms of analogy.
I still like the UX of 1Password, if you ever allow local vaults and still charge subscription, I'll sign up on day 1 - I just don't want anything to do with my entire vault being hosted elsewhere, potentially irrational but when it comes to things we store in 1Password and the like - CC #, Passport number, decryption keys, licence codes, launch codes (jk) - I feel OK with my irrational paranoia.
Thanks again for making 1Password!
Businesswise, it makes sense as a first push: get a solid UX working for existing 1pass users who sync via the cloud better access on Linux. Then move on to the less glamarous parts like local vaults.
> I just don't want anything to do with my entire vault being hosted elsewhere, potentially irrational...
There is no logical mechanism that can tell you the correct amount of risk to take on, and yet you can't take actions without accepting some degree of risk. You can't justify your tolerance of risk, so it can't be rational, and yet you have to take an action, therefore you can't be fairly accused of being irrational. It's thus neither; I call it "arational" behavior.
You might think, hold on, there's a logical way: I'll look at what happens to a group of people pursuing different risk strategies, then model the expected risk vs return, and thus I can determine the optimal level of risk.
But I'd argue it's fallacious to apply that general claim to the individual. For one, you invariably have a set of outliers who were overly risky and beat the odds, were they all wrong? If not, what's the cutoff point, and why? (And likewise, a set of outliers who were unlucky despite being overly conservative, were they also wrong?)
Another reason is, as they say in finance, "past performance is no guarantee of future results." Any model you come up with to justify a risk strategy can and will be invalidated as history unfolds.
Hosting only an executable I download and execute means the adversarial extraction of data must be contained within the executable and bypass all security from within my system. There is a window of opportunity for sending out a signal indicating the executable can not be trusted.
I do trust the team of 1Password to be competent and not evil, but there are many things that can go wrong anyway.
I remain disappointed that there is no way to set up nor configure a 1Password.com account without the web client.
I used to be a happy 1Password customer until they decided that they did not want people like me as customers. I trust the code, I don’t trust them to store my data, encrypted or not.
There’s no way I’m moving to a 1Password account, but I might just switch away entirely the next time I need to pay for an update or whatever, given the apparent lack of interest in serving my needs despite the amount of money I’ve paid for updates, etc. to date and the fact that it’s clearly technically possible.
Why?
2. I don’t want to store my data on their servers. I have ways of securely syncing data that I trust and that use only devices I control. For reasons of trust, security, etc. I want control of where my vaults are stored and it not to be the same company as the one that provides the software (for some machines/vaults I can also prevent 1Password from accessing the internet at all, to ensure the vault can’t leave a secure network, for instance).
3. If everything I store in synced folders was a separately charged service I’d be paying thousands a month. This trend is unsustainable and unwanted. I see absolutely no incremental value in the hosting service so I don’t want to pay for it.
3. The whole sleazy business model that pushes users towards subscriptions and makes it harder and harder to stay on self hosted vaults and uses things like this, described by them as the most requested feature, as leverage to try and force more users to switch. When the subscription model was introduced there were assurances to concerned customers that we were valued and this self hosted sync method would be supported. I am fine not getting features that are and should be deeply integrated with and require their hosting service (I also have no interest in ever having access to my vault via a web browser, which has the potential for horrible enough security properties that I’m glad it’s not an option (and I don’t have the time or inclination to have a feature which I don’t require anyway audited)). But when an entire desktop client is put in that bucket, it is because someone decided to make it so to try and get us to fall in line, not because it needs to be. Not the action of a company that respects any the users who still want to self host like they say they did.
At this point, with what appears to be a company that’s hostile to my use case, it’s getting difficult to justify spending more money at the next upgrade just to avoid the one time pain of evaluating options and switching to something that’s potentially better for my needs (if it, say, has a full Linux client I can use). If I move I’ll also likely plan to switch over the teams I manage that do use the subscription model. Subscription software makes far more sense in a corporate setting, and if the 1Password account fits the threat model then great, I use it, but if I am no longer using or evaluating 1Password (especially when the reason is partly trust in the company itself), that gets trickier, as does continuing to recommend it to others.
It seems that this is signalling your commitment to stop supporting users like me, and that's very disappointing.
So you are a subscriber in reality, it's just your payments a slightly lumpy.
Buying a license implies you own it and are entitled to use it indefinitely. You might not get any updates but you also aren’t losing access to what you already paid for. Very, very big difference.
Forgive my bluntness, but to me this looks like you're just testing forced adoption of 1password.com hosted SaaS on a platform you don't really care about before rolling out the same to Mac & Windows. Which would be unfortunate.
For the same reason that they won't bring local vaults to Linux, I don't think they'll ever kill local vaults for macOS or Windows. There are customers who paid for that product, and expect it to still work. (And, unlike e.g. an old version of Photoshop, it's implicit in the USP of a "password manager" product that it'll continue to get updated so that it works on new OSes and so forth, so that you can still have access to your passwords. You can't just stop supporting it; that'd break the whole value-prop of the product, retroactively, and so break the trust of future customers in any "password manager" products you have today.)
I’m happy with this arrangement - it’d be a shame if the Linux client never gets this functionality.
I have been a happy 1Password customer for years, but I am in the market for a change now. I really wish 1Password had an iOS client that didn't require 17+ permissions.
I don't believe it would be an overwhelming amount of work to implement the write portion (err, aside from getting a security review) but I do seriously doubt that KeePassXC would accept the PR to change the backing store, meaning it would have to be a fork :-(
Was so frustrated at this it pushed me to move to bitwarden. Good for them for sorting it though.
I'm loving bitwarden too. It's slightly not as good as 1p in some ways, but better in more than others. That's my review :)
Plus, there was something not right about the fact I was actually paying for these damn tools and still having to write my own code! Thought I'd just get out as quickly as I could and not go back.
But having seen others in these threads complain, I do now feel kind of bad!
That'd be pretty great.
Caveat that it doesn't emit a csv you can import elsewhere, it's not extremely polished, hasn't ever been run outside of my laptop, just does a bunch of unnecessarily clever things. Needs the 1password commandline utility `op` set up (ie you have to have told it your secret key already).
It'll create `items/` and `documents/` dirs with one file per, well, item or document, named after the uuid. It tries to make a symlink named after the metadata for each file in the hope that you'll have an ok time tabcompleting your way to the desired secret. There's some attempt to not redownload files that you already have, mostly because I re-ran this thing a million times trying to get it to work.
I wrote this to be able to zip all my secrets, `scrypt` the zip file with a strong password, and put the scrypted file on a usb drive that isn't particularly well hidden, just as another fallback/recovery option in case a meteor hits 1password HQ or my paper backups catch fire.
1. It runs on every platform I currently use, as well as any platform I might care to use, whether or not that platform is sufficiently "popular" for a company to justify caring about it.
2. It isn't dependent on the continued healthy existence of a company to remain usable, as I could simply self-maintain in a worst case scenario.
These are very important things about a password manager to me, personally, which is why any of these more polished/popular options would be an extremely tough sell.
And 1password never cared about Linux. I had to custom-script data export, they pretty much held data hostage by making it difficult to migrate from the platform, not to speak of the undocumented data formats. But at least we did not have to install some closed source propietary thing to do something as critical as password management (browser sandboxing seems slightly better). If they cared they would open up their client‘s code for everyone to peek.
They already participate, quite openly, in security audits[0], and while yes, I'd love it if it was OSS too, but the reality of making money on these services is that (especially I believe at the time 1Password was founded), is it wouldn't have likely done them any good, really. In fact it could hurt their business. I believe 1Password was one of (but not the only!) pioneers of this being a successful consumer business.
Notably, I don't think its worth detracting from a fantastic product based solely on the license of its underlying software. I'm also not aware of any 1Password data breaches.
As far as exporting goes, you can simply generate a CSV file (or plain txt)[1] as well. Not sure what the issue there was, I'd be curious to know.
While I like OSS too, and prefer it when able, I think its a stretch to say they're holding their users hostage if they want to migrate away, not to mention being OSS isn't really a predicate as to whether the software & user experience is actually any good.
disclaimer: I don't work for 1Password, but I've used it for over a decade.
Audits don’t mean much for various reasons, including the conflict of interest.
Agencies such as NSA don’t have to say loudly that they have agreements with such and such companies through PRISM-like programs.
We have seen the program. We can have as many binary copies of it as we’d like.
> Audits don’t mean much for various reasons, including the conflict of interest.
[citation needed]
> Agencies such as NSA don’t have to say loudly that they have agreements with such and such companies through PRISM-like programs.
The product uses end to end encryption. The database is encrypted locally before being uploaded. They would have to be using bad encryption or stealing your password to get at it. It is understood how 1P works, they have written about it extensively.
I'm doubtful that you are able to look at the binaries and extract the inner workings from that.
Yeah, I have to trust a lot of software authors not to be actively malicious, because I don't have the time to audit literally everything I rely on. I have more reason to trust the authors of 1Password than those of almost any other package I use.
>And they do have a very clear business interest in telling you that it uses best security practices even if they don't.
It's been audited several times, and the authors are well known, respected, and vocal in the infosec community. And you think they have more of a business interest in hiring security professionals and lying about their practices than they do actually building a product that safeguards their users' data as they say it does? A backdoor in a product like that would be the end of their business, professional reputation, and career.
>I'm doubtful that you are able to look at the binaries and extract the inner workings from that.
Me personally? No, but there are absolutely people with that skillset, this sort of thing is perfectly doable. As far as "is this sending all my stuff to China in plaintext" goes, it's not even that hard to evaluate. You could do that without any reverse engineering at all.
There is (was?) no way to do that on Linux.
The only missing piece for me is a native Linux app since I use Ubuntu for all my development environments. The web browser extension works, but it's a noticeable difference moving between it and the windows desktop app. I'm super excited to give this a try.
Unsubscribed from LastPass and subscribed to a Family plan here. Hoping for updates to bring all the rest of the features. <3
EDIT: Took the opportunity to eval a couple of others. BitWarden stood out because it's open-source and cheaper for the family plan (the difference between 1Password individual and BitWarden family is not a big difference).
My thoughts:
* 1Password had a really cool app and very good import from LastPass
* Bitwarden's app is pretty good but the import breaks on Secure Notes that are a bit longer
Ultimately went with Bitwarden because it's cheap and I was able to migrate my big notes in approx 10 minutes manually.
One thing still missing I really hope to see though is the local application (on all platforms) supporting hardware tokens for unlock (with a backup master option). That'd be a nice extra security+convenience option which would work across platforms.
However, for something as high-value as a password manager, I think having a subscription model makes a lot of sense. I can't think of any other class of product where timely updates from the developers are so critical to the utility of the product. You could even argue that an unpatched, out of date password manager is worse than no password manager.
>I can't think of any other class of product where timely updates from the developers are so critical to the utility of the product.
I can think of a ton actually, although I guess it depends on what you consider important functionality there. Now, there is ongoing maintenance needed for things like keeping up with browser integration, but I'm not sure exactly what security updates should ever be needed unless they really fucked something basic up. The only things that need constant attention are their own cloud service, but that's a function of it being their own cloud service vs someone running their own server or syncing via Dropbox.
>You could even argue that an unpatched, out of date password manager is worse than no password manager.
I don't think you could frankly. Like, what's the threat model here when we're talking data that lives on our own systems and is E2EE? Fundamentally, password managers do not defend against the trusted end point being pwned, for that you need an HSM of some sort (or at least some weaker but still somewhat functional kinda of 2FA). All data from the end system should be fully encrypted before leaving, and since the system is trusted by definition timing attacks shouldn't be a concern (or at least are trivial here to negate entirely), so the security should depend purely upon the PM's ability to perform basic at rest crypto, use a decent key stretching as needed, etc. Which is frankly a solved problem with well vetted free libraries, that's not the hard part of security.
Honestly, 1Password and the like aren't that different from the macOS Keychain Access I'd been using for many many years before hand. They've got better organization and UX flow these days, and browser integration is a genuinely big deal. But I never had any problems with Dropbox sync with pre-1P.com nor do I still have any problems with sync there. In principle, the 1P team could have made all the admittedly alright group stuff and so on available as a standalone server thing people could run along with their own cloud offering of the same, similar to the way Gitlab and many others do. Buy the server/client licenses standalone and run infra yourself, or not, your call. WiFi sync didn't have to be left as primitive as it has been either. Etc. It's a business decision for them to push subs because subs are very profitable. And I recognize yeah, it's a way to make lots more money in a reliable fashion which people like. But I still regret the sub trend and think it's usually a negative overall particularly for people trying to fill situations outside the norm. 1Password's sub thing for example doesn't scale with large families, there is a huge disconnect between a small family and an "organization" in their pricing and general structure which isn't due to cost basis, it's due to their perceived ability to pay.
I'm genuinely optimistic though that things like Webauthn represent real turning points, and we're finally (10-15 years late but better late then never) moving away from the madness of service passwords and managers "have i been pwned" and all the layers that essentially recreate PKI, very badly. As far as security goes, neither I nor anyone else should need to give a single shit or change anything at all if a website is completely utterly hacked, because the only authentication that should be there should be a public cert for me. Damn it, asymmetric credentials was solved forever ago!
There is also no logical reason to pay agile bits for single-purpose back-end infrastructure when we already have dropbox, etc.. An encrypted password file is tiny.
Subscription apps (and subscriptions in general) are simply not scalable in their current implementation.
Still rocking my 1Password 4 license on Windows and OSX from years ago with no plans on upgrading. When I’m finally forced to, I’ll simply switch to another product.
I'd tried a lot of password managers before and never found any that quite fit as well as 1Password, which is why I was still using it.
I'd tried Keepass and its variants every time but it was never _quite_ there. The interface was clunky and things that I expected to be core to the product (additional fields, OTP, etc) were addons.
Stumbled on KeepassXC this time. Solved most of those problems. Certainly well enough to replace the old, unsupported software I'd been using for something as important as my most vital secrets and identity documents.
Just got everything migrated over.
Bye, AgileBits! After 5 years it's been... swell?
Mostly great sync across devices, and great apps on all devices (all mobile, all browsers, and all desktop OS except Linux for now).
If you mainly use one computer and don't mind tools which are a bit less polished, it's not that compelling.
Is this using webview? On Mac I believe the app is completely native, so does this mean 1Password will be switching over to using webviews across platforms?
At work we use 1PW. Compared to BW I find 1PW awkward and often counterintuitive. I suppose it has to do with habits. But I had few awkward moments with going from LP to BW.
I'm not knocking 1PW. Only suggesting that if you're in the market for a PW manager, check Bitwarden
Frustrating how difficult it was to install the iOS version without a subscription, I even wrote an article to save others the confusion: https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/1password-ios-standalon...
Sure you can use lots of other password managers, but if we are not talking about solo use case - it's practically impossible to beat 1Pass. You can set up your team and family in minutes, with granular controls. And people will understand how to use it in a few minutes.
With most other solutions you will have to spend hours here or there. Is that time worth a few bucks? For me I would gladly pay x2 so it just works and no one has to bother me with questions.
I can't imagine paying for an application when a better one is available for free.
I see this as quite reasonable thinking for somebody who never had too much money.
Of course it might be that in this case the much more obvious is the case: throwing your most important data into a cloud on a close source system is kinda..."optimistic".
What happened, if not too sensitive to share, of course.
That sounds interesting. Can you list the major technical reasons behind this decision? Also interesting will be if you could explain how Rust addressed those pain points (I have read about the general advantages that Rust has over C++, but interested in hearing how it plays out in the wild).
Something I could do without though is all of the GUI animations & transitions. They create time delays, little waits that add together that introduce unnecessary delays. Sometimes I just want to login, and I want to login now.
Now I've settled pretty comfortably into a different password manager. Even if the Linux port of 1P gets up to feature parity with the other versions, I don't see much of a practical reason to hassle with bothering to try it.
Granted I could be wrong. The long track record of 1P is definitely a plus. And maybe they have enough nice features to make it worth it. It's definitely a harder sell for me now though than it would have been if Linux had been a first class citizen when I was first choosing a password manager.
It's not as trivial to set up as Lockwise or 1Password, but I prefer this setup because:
- 100% Open Source - I own the keyring and can sync it across literally all of my machines, plus the cloud storage provider(s) of my choice seamlessly - The keyring is protected by a key that only I know, no third party is handling the unlock on my behalf
But I've been using Lockwise for years (and the previous cloud tool from Firefox, Sync, IIRC) and it mostly does the job. Sometimes I'd like to edit the entries to a finer grain or add foreign passwords (the ones that don't relate to a webpage) but that's it. Extremely easy to get running and sync.
[1] https://dl.enpass.io/docs/EnpassSecurityAssessmentReport.pdf
Enpass always worked seamlessly, and it was a one-time purchase for me back then. (They changed it to a subscription model a year ago)
Inertia kept me with LastPass, but I really should have fought that. There's just no comparison between the pile of slow crap that is LastPass and it. I guess I just accepted that a password filler would be clunky, but... no. 1Password is much, much better.
Just curious, since I don't have issues with Lastpass, but I mostly use the chrome extension.
It's as of LastPass stagnated and 1Password left it behind.
1. https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/87292/auto-type...
I figure if I can find others with the same issue, maybe I could find a commonality. I spoke with support, but apparently it's not a known issue.
I've recently switched over from Ubuntu-Genome to Ubuntu-i3 and now for the life of me, I can't get chrome to sync/autofill/remember my passwords :( - Same user just different desktop/wm, why is chrome so good and so bad ! Anyone have any ideas how to fix chrome or can recommended a "unix-spirit(do one thing etc...)" password-manager for Linux+Android+Chrome ?
Using it for years now and am happy with it. Although it start from this pretty basic setup, you can extend your usage with mobile apps and browser extensions.
When my shop standardizes on a password manager program/browserplugin for Linux development workstations, I currently don't see us picking a closed source one.
I get that organizations with many users don’t want to deal with database management. For personal use though, keepassxc is fine.
But this is just how ~the software~ business works now. Investors want predictable ROI. If your business can’t/won’t show *aaS revenue predictability, investors will take their money somewhere that can.
I hate subscriptions because the costs adds up very quickly. I try to save more than 50% of my income so having several subs is just not happening.
I'd rather not have any software at all or much crappier alternatives of it rather than paying every month.
In that scenario they would only have your single site password and not your master key.
Having one place that both stores your password and generates the OTP seems to defeat the purpose of 2FA no?
Plans on https://1Password.ca are CA $7.95/month (CA ~$96 for the year) for monthly billing. We think this is a killer price for five family members without any restrictions like living at the same residence. You do save quite a bit with annual billing, but I understand that's not for everyone.
Great to see them put effort into supporting Linux.
For one, LastPass _always_ freezes Chrome on me a few times a day.
I was going to switch to LastPass since I have two younger children that I'd like to use a password manager, but LastPass has the same 17+ restriction so I'm looking for other options. But if you don't have the same issue, 1Password is a solid choice.
- Please rethink sections. Most items are better off without them, so they should be revealed only when requested, not cluttering every create and edit screen and making me sort half my fields under a “SECTION” section just to not use sections.
- Please rethink the flow for adding a new field of a non-text type. It’s just silly to have to scan down for “SECTION”, then down for “new field”, then right for “T”, then click, then scan down for the field type, then click, then click in the data box, every time I want to add a one-time password.
- Please hide unused items from the sidebar, like empty categories, “Favorites” when there are no favorites, and the vault switcher when there’s only one vault. The clutter makes it slower and harder to use.
- Please condense Watchtower into one sidebar entry. My two options right now are “don’t see Watchtower alerts” and “push the rest of the sidebar so far down I only see a few non-Watchtower items”, neither of which is good.
- Please separate “Ignore HTTPS warning for this website”, ignore 2FA warning, etc, from tags. I don’t want to pollute my tagging system with what’s essentially “items on a LAN”, “items where 1Password’s 2FA list is wrong”, etc.
- Please give me a keyboard shortcut to create a new login regardless of the currently selected category. I suggest Command-N for “New in current category”, Shift-Command-N for “New login”, and Option-Command-N for “Open new item type menu”, but would settle for anything that consistently creates a new login with one shortcut.
- Please change the popup password generator to match the 1Password Mini password generator: include 1+ numbers and symbols when checked, not a preset number, and omit symbols that are usually rejected by websites, because the small entropy gain isn’t worth the time spent manually editing passwords.
- Please revise your passphrase word list, or at least provide an alternate list. It’s hard to remember words nobody knows. (That’s the use case for passphrases, passwords that sometimes need to be spoken or remembered, for the rest I’ll use a higher entropy password.) I know using only common words would be less secure, but there’s a better balance to be struck; Bitwarden’s list is excellent.
- Please work to reduce full UI refreshes. I keep losing keystrokes to them.
- Please give me configurable URL matching rules like Bitwarden. Without them there will always be some false positive page matches that I need to arrow through every time I use that domain.
I love you guys. I’m willing to pay your price for great software. But these annoyances keep piling up and I feel that the price warrants more care.
Regardless, the idea is still that a secure password manager would put you in a better situation more often than would a plain text file, cloud notes, physical notebook/sticky, etc.
Now, there are some potential usability improvements they can offer by giving the passwords to "some company" but there's a serious price (not only financial) to pay for that.
Also, because it's designed as a standard Unix tool if you're comfortable in Unix (as we may suppose more Linux users are) you'll find pass fits better than 1password or similar programs. When did you change the password for your Hacker News account? You can use 'git' to ask like you would anything else. How will you ensure the passwords survive a house fire? They're on your filesystem and will be preserved with everything else in your backups (you do have backups and use encrypted storage for them right?).
And so on.