Bitwarden. Its dead simple and cross-platform + regularly audited. And either FREE or $10 a year for 2FA and some other nice to haves.

Obviously there's other choices for those who want more control over it but you can't go wrong with BW.

I am currently trialling Bitwarden. I have found that it's that great at picking up that you are creating an account, offering to generate and then saving the result (using Firefox with Bitwarden extension). I am looking at the other options as they are reportedly better at that sort of thing.

It's a shame though because Bitwarden is philosophically what I'm looking for.

Think you might have missed a not in there, if I'm reading sentiment correctly. "...found that it's that great..."

I did - edited to fix.

I noticed that as well, the fix for me is pretty easy: just create the account in bitwarder first and then autofill it in the actual account creation page. No extra work, and becomes habit quite quickly.

This is fine on desktop. It's less great on mobile.

I haven't found it to be too bad on mobile... but ymmv of course.

I used to agree with this until I thought about the order in which to do it. The issue was that I'd open BitWarden manually to create credentials, rather than doing it during the autofill popup.

Here's how I do it on iOS:

1. Select the password field and open BitWarden through the button above the keyboard.

2. The password list will be empty. Press the + to create new credentials.

3. Enter a username, generate a password and press save.

4. The list will now have a single entry. Press it to autofill.

I do the same on mobile, not sure I noticed any reason it's worse there.

Notably, Bitwarden is also self-hostable, which, in combination with the good mobile clients, was enough to get me to switch to it from Keepass.

Vaultwarden is even easier to self-host, it's basically a single binary that uses a SQLite database: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden

2FA in the same app as your password defeats the point doesn't it?

It’s not my preferred method because I want 2FA to save me if my device is compromised, but it does still add protection against traditional password attacks, credential stuffing, etc. It even adds a layer of phishing resistance, as long as the user doesn’t blindly jump to copy/paste when autofill fails.

What is the phishing resistance it adds? Bitwarden auto copies TOTP to the clipboard.

Depends on the password manager. 1Password will not autofill if the domain doesn’t match. It’s up to the user at that point to check the url before copy/pasting the code. My guess is that the average user would do that by reflex without a second thought.

2fa is mitigation for weak passwords. With a password manager you can use a strong password, and 2fa becomes redundant.

> If most sites are salting and hashing passwords correctly

Wouldn't it have to be "if all sites are salting and hashing passwords correctly "? I suspect most "differentiation algorithms that are trivially runnable in your head" would be easily cracked with a couple examples.

I'd hazard no, because 'at scale'.

You could mechanical turk puzzle them trivially, but the realistic threat model is tens of thousands of credentials, tried against high value login prompts.

Spectre does that, is OSS and multiplatform: https://spectre.app/

i.e. it generates password given your name, a master password, and the website hostname (or whatever).

Quite handy.

How do you rotate the password when the site requires you to?

The Keypass unhosted ecosystem seems to fit your requirements. I recently switched to it from 1Password and am happy with it. I distribute the database to my various devices with (open source) Syncthing.

The distributed part is crucial, especially to avoid potential hardware failure. Happened to me, older machine ram (might be misremembering, that old machine had several parts replaced) failure made keypass unable to validate, claiming a corrupt database.

A problem solved by a backup strategy, not a cloud service.

I firmly believe you can't expect cloud services to do anything but serve up exactly what you give them. If you give them a corrupt database, they will happily serve you up a corrupted database.

Technically, the problem is solved by either one. A service like 1password is in the business of not serving you up a corrupt database. A backup solution also works here if you don't want to rely on other services.

Sure, if 1Password's cloud service can inspect and validate the structure of the vault. I kind of hope they can't since the vault should be encrypted, but I'm also not quite that naive.

They don't have to validate the structure of the vault to ensure redundancy.

I use keepass2, and I keep a copy on a USB stick that I carry with me. Almost every device I log into regularly has a copy of the file, but I'll have to sync from the USB stick at times if the particular password I want was changed recently. I also keep a copy in the cloud, but it's usually out of date.

KeePass + Dropbox

Works on all platforms and all the good keepass apps and programs integrate with Dropbox.

The problems I see with this:

* Websites will be hacked or expire your password, so you will have to generate a new one. Even assuming you have a way to make a new password for the same site name, how do you keep track of which version number you are now?

* Website names are not evenly distributed, especially if taking the first two letters. Example: twitter/twitch.tv/twilio would all share a password

I like pass, the "Unix standard password manager": https://www.passwordstore.org/

It is very barebones -- basically a collection of GPG encrypted text files stored in Git. For that reason it's trivial to make clients for it and selfhost the repository if you're so inclined.

I second this. If you keep it in a container or a jail or something, you can run it on a server you control, set sshd to do password authentication, have one really good passphrase, and now you can access it anywhere you can get to a shell with ssh and Internet access. (This is obviously less secure, but the convenience is great if you need it.)

I've also done a version of this where it's stored on a Pi Zero, but the Zero (and SD cards) isn't the most reliable thing in the world and lost it a couple of times before I gave up, but it may work for others better.

It's more fiddly than a more featureful service, but I like it because I understand all of it and control all of it.

Second this too!

> It turns the security requirement from electronic security into physical security (and appropriate recovery and disposal procedures)

Good physical security of things like passwords is generally much easier than electronic security of them.

In the old days, my password manager was a slip of paper I kept in my wallet that listed my passwords. I kept duplicates at home and in my safe deposit box.

Now I pretty much do the same thing, except using an (offline) password manager instead of paper.

Passwordsafe/password Gorilla(Apple)

It’s been around for ages, I don’t know how well supported today, though it is what you asked for!