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And here I am still just using KeePass.

I feel like passwords can be way too sensitive to entrust to a third party. Even if you can verify that it is secure, you could still find yourself in a jam if their service goes down or is otherwise inaccessible.

You don't have to worry about any of this with a KeePass database. You just have to deal with the very mild inconvenience of keeping your database synchronized across devices.



> You just have to deal with the very mild inconvenience of keeping your database synchronized across devices.

Which is pretty easy with SyncThing. Other services like Dropbox are also fine if you have a sufficiently high entropy password. The danger isn't in the "online", but a third party being able to decrypt your passwords.


"Other services like Dropbox are also fine if you have a sufficiently high entropy password"

That's why you add that binary key file to the mix that you liberally distribute to all your devices. But that you carefully keep far off your sync platform. The danger of a weak password is when a device falls into the wrong hands, a compromised sync platform is much less of a concern (if the file is in the mix).


> Which is pretty easy with SyncThing

Is SyncThing available for iOS? I thought it wasn’t but I’d love to be wrong.


iOS seems to require some sort of File Provider implementation for syncing, which seems to work anywhere from terrible to mediocre.

But maybe I misunderstand the situation.


It's not


> Which is pretty easy with SyncThing.

That keeps the whole database file synchronized, sure. But KeePass synchronizes at the level of each entry.


I haven't touched KeePass in a while(especially since it always had its quirks outside of Windows, being .NET), but KeePassXC which started as a merger of all the various patches to KeepassX(the QT implementation), has been very active. It has a more secure browser integration than the original had, although it's worth noting that nothing ever came close to the accuracy of 1Password when it comes to website quirk integration[1]. There's also TouchID, OTP, better encryption and Yubikey integration of the top of my list.

I'd suggest using it in conjunction with Keepass2Android and KyPass(on iOS, someone mentioned Strongbox), although the Keepass2Android syncs and merges properly and the iOS does not.

[1] https://keepassxc.org/project/


On iOS there is strongbox and keepassium also.


I just bought Strongbox Pro just a couple of minutes ago. It's much nicer than KyPass. It's a bit pricey, but worth it if you can afford it.


KeePassXC is the desktop app I use across Windows, Linux, and Mac. It is fantastic. There are also multiple good apps for iOS, and I presume Android.

In my comment I used KeePass to refer to the database and not the specific application I use to manage it.


Yes, if you can keep your password local it's still the best option.

Sadly, once your use case becomes complicated and you need to share between devices, and potentially have partial sharing between people (e.g. your spouse, your parents etc.), it becomes a nightmare to manage. In particular trying to explain how sync is supposed to work with a third party on iOS is just pain.

I'm eyeing at self-hosted BitWarden instances, but then I kinda fear to someday be the one shooting myself in the foot and nuking everyone's literally life critical credentials...


The password managers that I'm aware of store your vault locally on-device, even if they also sync to a cloud service.

That said I agree with you I would never use a cloud-only store for passwords!


> You just have to deal with the very mild inconvenience of keeping your database synchronized across devices.

For HN crowd that is likely easy. (I also use that solution)


> you could still find yourself in a jam if their service goes down

This is true for many password managers that sync with the cloud. I use 1Password and I've made sure that I install apps on at least a couple of devices because the apps a local copy of the password data that can be accessed offline.

I've done that with another password manager that I used in the past too.

I used KeePass in the past and would likely still be using it if I didn't get 1Password free (free family account if your employer has a business account) and if I didn't need to have secure sharing with my wife.

Let me know if you know of a secure, convenient way to share password entries with another person using KeepPass that doesn't involve you sharing the your whole password database. I know you can have yet another password database that only contains shared records... but that definitely fails the convenience factor.


I keep them local too, but I haven't found a solution on how to keep my laptop and phone in sync.

It is not fun having to type a 30+ character password consisting uppercase+lowercase letters, numbers and special characters on a mobile device.

But it has helped me to keep my phone clutter free, so maybe there's an upside to it too :)


Have you tried pass (https://www.passwordstore.org/)?


I use a combination of a local only solution for the "master list" of passwords that I backup to cloud storage (which is not synced to my phone) in conjunction with the saved passwords & sync capabilities of Firefox for accessing it on my phone. Occasionally I'll be in a position where I'm on my phone and Firefox doesn't happen to have my latest password saved, so I just initiate a password reset for whatever that service is, set it to a new password, and then circle back later when I'm back on my machine to update my local only storage solution. It's not the most streamlined and user friendly, but it works well enough.


> It is not fun having to type a 30+ character password consisting uppercase+lowercase letters, numbers and special characters on a mobile device.

I find that it's much faster to type an all lowercase password that's a bit longer to get the same strength.


KeePass2android and KeePassDX can help on Android. You can self host such as on NextCloud


As mentioned throughout this thread, Syncthing can seamlessly sync between Android phones and Windows/Linux hosts. There are apps for iOS as well, but they can be a bit more finicky due to Apple's app sandbox implementation.


I use Syncthing for that. It syncs over my home WiFi network only.


Dropbox works for this.


Self-hosted BitWarden?


Last time I tried it the UX for sharing/collaborating on a keepass database was horrendous at best. Has that improved in the intervening years?


This, very much so. I use KeepassXC (Strongbox on iOS) with Seafile to sync the database files. It's only gotten better over the years, and I'd rather see my donation money go directly to the developers than get slurped up into some SaaS that doesn't care about me or security anyway.


Does your sync setup work in realtime in the background? Earlier this year I was evaluating iOS devices and a showstopper was the apparent inability to have keepass database updates push-synced: the closest I got was a scheduled copy of the file at a given time daily, but my nightmare was making a change on one device, needing that change on the iOS device, having it not be there, and not having network to go fetch it. It'd be neat if you've got a way to make this work more like Syncthing on Android.


No, that's a limitation in the setup but it's something I am willing to live with. I can make edits on my computer and "pull" them onto my phone, but not the other way around.

However I think this is a limitation of the app itself more than a limitation of the system in principle. As far as I can tell, the developer decided to only support a couple of the most popular cloud sync platforms. Maybe guess there is no consistent API for that sort of thing in iOS.


Gotcha, thank you.




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