Bitwarden Authenticator is a standalone app that is available for everyone, even non-Bitwarden customers.
In its current release, Bitwarden Authenticator generates time-based one-time passwords (TOTP) for users who want to add an extra layer of 2FA security to their logins.
There is a comprehensive roadmap planned with additional functionality.
Available for iOS and Android
To those that are confused about this:
Bitwarden does indeed handle TOTP directly in the password manager, but only on paid accounts and only logged in.
This is a completely offline app, separate from your existing Bitwarden account, that is entirely free.
It might serve as an alternative to e.g Aegis to some.
Is there a good reason I don’t know about to prefer this over Aegis?
I used to use Aegis, but after setting up my own vaultwarden, I use the normal bitwarden app/plugin on all my systems for passwords and TOTP.
The advantages are that I don’t need my phone to login, the keys are synced and backuped in the encrypted vaultwarden database, which I can then handle with normal server backup tools. It still works offline, because bitwarden app caches the password.
This is IMO much more convenient and secure (in a way that loosing access to a device doesn’t shut you out, and you don’t need to trust third parties) then most other solutions.
I don’t think it caches the password. Rather a decryption key is derived from your password and is used to unlock the encrypted blob.
What I meant is that is caches the password database for offline use.
Even if I hosted my own BitWarden vault, I wouldn’t put my passwords and 2 factor tokens in the same place because it’s eliminating the benefits that 2 factor provides if someone somehow manages to get into my vault.
2 factor came into our life because people were using same passwords everywhere. With unique passwords, which are easy with password managers, it’s rarely needed.
That may have been part of the reason, but the theory behind MFA is that there are 3 primary ways to authenticate who you are: what you know (password), what you have (secure one time password generator or hardware token), and what you are (biometrics). Password managers and digital one time password generators have kind of blurred the lines between passwords and one time passwords, but you’re raising your risk a bit if you put them in the same place.
No, they’re both ostensibly open source and standalone. I’m an avid Bitwarden Free user, but Aegis has been my go-to for a long time.
If it’s a standalone completely offline app, like Aegis, I’m at a loss to what they could offer that is any different than what Aegis already offers.
2FA push is on the roadmap. Does aegis have that? Or am I just too dense to realise it does?
I mean, Aegis is 2FA? That’s literally all it is? It generates One Time Pad codes for various sites and apps that support authentication apps.
So, I’m not sure what you mean?
I’m not positive but I’m assuming they’re referring to a kind of MFA where the authenticating service pushes to the client you possess rather than relying on a temporal cryptographic key. I’ve got a few services which work that way
That’s indeed what I meant. Similar to how OKTA, battle.net, or the Microsoft authenticator works( in corporate environments).
You receive a push notification which asks if you’re trying to log in and approve it, followed by a fingerprint or a pin code to confirm, rather than having to type in the code generated by your app
If you look at the roadmap they have in the blogpost, they are apparently planning tighter integration with the existing bitwarden suite
…but wouldn’t that undermine the fact that it’s standalone and offline?
The idea is that it can then work both says, like https://ente.io/auth does
Sand the fact that it’s a 2fa. A thicker integration with bitwarden would make it like a 1.5fa
I don’t see why it would if it’s optional
Reading these comments, it feels like Aegis became the standard without me noticing.
Reading these comments I feel like I’m completely out of the loop because I’ve never even heard of Aegis
same
It doesn’t get a whole lot of attention but it’s the most mature open source authenticator app and one of the first ones you would find in fdroid. With that said, there’s nothing really standout about it or its features, it just works.
Just on Lemmy
interesting. what makes it special? i’m assuming it’s just like any other TOTP client?
Not switchin’ from Aegis. No sir’ee.
I use the TOPT features and i dont have a paid account
Do you self-host? I think that’s another way to get the TOTP features w/o a paid account.
At this moment Aegis is far superior to bitwarden auth. But it looks promising.
I really like the ability to “sideload” the icons for the codes and automatic encrypted backups to cloud storages.It might serve as an alternative to e.g Aegis to some.
Does it have any killer features in favor of using the free app of an for-profit company instead of an established FOSS app?
Bitwarden apps have been open source since the beginning, mobile + backend + web
I haven’t been entirely happy with Bitwarden for other reasons. You can’t self host and share with one other person without paying them $40/year. Their advertising is deceptive, because they say you can do both for free. But that one or the other, not both.
You also can’t easily share individual passkeys outside of the app. If you want to grab a passkey, you have to export your entire vault.*
It’s basically annoyance-ware.
* note that sharing passkeys is not best practice, but there are use cases.
Have you heard if VaultWarden?
As others have said vaultwarden is the solution here. It is free, you can manage multiple vaults, totp is free. All the platform bit warden apps & plugins work with it. Supposedly it is leaner and easier to set up. Don’t know for sure because it is all I have used.
For shared passwords, I have a family vault where I put my streaming pws and such and everyone has access without having to share my personal vault.
I don’t think I realized that was a limitation because I’ve been using the Vaultwarden fork. https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden
Correct me if I am wrong, but the Bitwarden client itself already does this. I store several of my TOTP’s in my self hosted Vaultwarden/Bitwarden install.
And where would you store your Bitwarden login TOTP if you used their service instead of self hosting?
And what happens if your Bitwarden account gets compromised? Now you’ve lost both factors at the same time.
No, I’ll keep my 2FA separate from my password manager, thank you very much.
Good luck getting your vault compromised.
Unless you have a weak password or the vault isn’t encrypted (which it is, AES256 iirc and you might be able to change that on a self hosted version), I don’t see that happening.
Most password manager hacks don’t attack the encryption or password themselves (my password is very long), they find/create a side channel. For example:
- keylogger attack to grab password manager password
- social engineering to reset a password
- attack the server to intercept passwords
Every secure system can be defeated, but it’s a lot less likely that two secure systems will be defeated at the same time. So I keep my passwords and second factors separate. It’s unlikely that either will be compromised, and incredibly unlikely that both will be compromised at the same time.
You’re right, it does. This is a head-scratcher.
I guess they already had the TOTP code written, so creating a standalone app was trivial, but what’s the point?
TOTP code is like 5 lines. The hardest part is writing the seed to disk.
Because you can enable totp on your Bitwarden account and it would be dumb to store the password and totp for your biwarden vault in your vault?
Also it can act as a stepping stone for non Bitwarden customers, before getting their own vault.
Security-wise it’s not a good idea to keep passwords and 2FA codes in the same client as it then becomes a single point of failure. A standalone authenticator app resolves that as long as it’s not unlocked with the same master password. A standalone app also opens a venue for non-BW customers to get on their platform.
It’s not a good idea to keep both on the same device, but i wouldn’t use it at all if it was a struggle
Would it count if the application is the same but all the TOTP is handles by a different database with a different passphrase?
thd totp in the default application is paid and that isn’t
TOTP in the Bitwarden Vault is a paid feature. The standalone app is free, and doesn’t even require a Bitwarden account.
This allows free tier users a way to use TOTP without upgrading, and without needing to trust Google Authenticator or something else.
KeePassXC can do this as well. I had no idea until I saw a post on here where someone mentioned it. Here’s the documentation.
I personally have no use for this since I use Aegis and sync it with my synology drive
Why not just use Strongbox? All of that’s built in and don’t have to store your vault on their cloud.
This new app is offline.
? Works fine for me and their site seems to be normal as well:
No I mean the new bitwarden app works completely offline lol
Great. Now I have to make the effort of migrating from Authy.
After Authy scrapped its support for the desktop client, I’m looking for an alternative. Sadly, this does not look like it.
Sadly, this does not look like it.
Why?
I do not see a desktop client.
Ah. I only use a phone app, but I see the problem.
I use Authenticator on Linux. I’m not sure what OS you use, but perhaps there’s another, TOTP is a pretty easy protocol to implement (it’s basically just a hash of a key and timestamp).
Ente.io is working on a desktop app. Whilst its experimental, you can get it from the releases page on their github
Nice! I currently have a couple of services on MS Authenticator that I can migrate over.
What makes you switch to this one rather than staying on MS?
Microsoft’s Authenticator app is AWFUL. Just one example - there is a setting to backup to iCloud, but when you try to enable it, it demands you add a secondary (personal) Microsoft account.
MS not trustworthy
Honestly? This.
The less I have to rely on Microsoft or googie for anything, the better.
OK, so one TOTP app more. What’s this one doing better than all the others like 2FAS?
Yeah, they’re are a few open source TOTP apps that seem pretty interchangeable. I use Authenticator Pro because it has a Wear OS integration that is handy if you have a smart watch.
For now: Nothing. Pretty bare metal atm.
one TOTP app more
You say this as a bad thing.
Not at all, I’m just wondering if this particular one is better than any of the others.
Nice. But as a BitWarden user, it’s useless to me. I’ve never put all my eggs in one account basket.
Passwords on one service, MFA on another, email on yet another, etc.
I’m not putting my totp with my password, same as I’m not putting my password with my email (proton)
It’s a separate app with no sync to Bitwarden accounts.
Still, I bet they share a lot of the same backend and personell.
Exactly, from a security perspective, it’s a bad idea to put 2 factor tokens together with your passwords. You effectively eliminate the security benefit that 2 factor provides if you do because if people get into your password manager, they have everything they need to access your accounts. The only people it “helps” having it all in one app are people who don’t understand the purpose of 2 factor and just see it as an inconvenience when services force it on them. Even though I use BitWarden for passwords, I don’t think that I’ll be changing from Aegis to BitWarden’s stand-alone authenticator because Aegis is doing its job nicely.
That’s also part of why I’m against the new passkeys. I think passkeys could replace either passwords or tokens, but not both.
And seemingly reading beyond the headline is also not your thing.
This is a separate app unconnected to your bitwarden account…
I assume its still absolutely impossible to migrate from one authenticator app to another without having to set it all up again?
You can use Authenticator Pro (android, opensesource) and Proton Pass, both let you copy the TOTP generation code to paste into another without problem. Both generate exact code
In fact that’s how I am using them right now, with Authenticator Pro is my on-device, offline, encrypted backup offline backup TOTP for Pass.
I guess it is not as straight forward as export import as you hope, but it’s not as bad as other options used to be.
As long as you can access the keys, you can swap authenticator apps.
I tried a few until I landed in Aegis, and I have two on my desktop that I’m trying out as well. Just get something that allows exporting the keys and there will be a path to switching apps.
“Import” does appear on the roadmap for this month, we probably can’t know what’s the scope fr that but you’llhave your answer soon :p
Thank goodness! I can finally get the hell away from Authy!
You could have before. I moved from Authy to Aegis a few months ago
What’s wrong with Authy?
They discontinued the desktop client about a month ago, which is what made me stop using it.
Not open source, and I believe an account is required.
Also doesn’t allow you to export so you can’t switch to another service
Uhg… Didn’t know that part. So frustrating.
Also they have weird behind the scenes integrations into accounts even if they are just supposed to be regular 2FA. You can read stories about Twitch not playing well with other 2FA until 30 days after you remove Authy. I don’t want those kind of shadow integrations and I should be allowed to switch apps as I see fit
And twilio, the parent company has been hacked before
I guess for me, it being closed-source and the fact that the Bitwarden password manager and now Bitwarden authenticator are open source. Truthfully, I just see how they handled the desktop version of their Authy software, giving no fucks if consumers wanted it or not, being a big red flag of what could come after. Having used Bitwarden for years now, and giving them $10 a year, makes me more biased and inclined to use their other software, since they’ve never let me down. :)
I use Aegis and it works well. FOSS and easy to use.
Too many things use it, if it becomes compromised that is way too broad of an attack for me to opt into
with full Internet access (As shown in Aurora Store)
Thanks but I pass, I’d rather use Aegis that doesn’t need internet connection at all.
How does 2FA work without an internet connection?
Any reason to switch from Aegis?
Is there anything about Aegis that makes it better than Authy? Just looking at the page for Aegis, I’m not seeing a lot of difference. And it being Android only limits it.
It’s open source. Authy isn’t.
Not yet.
No icons, no ability to save notes, a URL or back it up in an encrypted json.
I will definitely keep an eye on it though.Thats what i want to know, i use Authy, and want to know if its worth switching for.
