Bitwarden Password Manager

A strong password must be a combination of capital letters, lower case letters, numbers and special characters. And the longer, the better. The following website gives you an overview on how vulnerable a password can be: https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm.

For example, qwerty can be cracked in less than 1 second. g6-M?3Vl is a much better password with all above requirements but it doesn’t resist much longer than 1 minute to an attack coming from an array of powerful computers… which doesn’t happen every day, I admit.

The same array of machines could take more than 1.4 hundred millions of centuries to crack a 16 long passwords like g6-M?3Vl@p6/43L(

But how could we memorize this type of password if I have a different strong one for each of my account… mail, bank, retail, … We may easily have more than 100 accounts we frequently use.

Let’s use an Excel spreadsheet to collect all the passwords and protected it with a strong password… why not, but you need to have this file on all your devices and make sure it is always synchronized after each and every change… not very convenient.

What about Passwords Managers embedded into browsers, the database is kept synchronized wherever you go but here you’re stuck with one type of browser.

My advise, use a proper Password Manager application which is independant from any browser. There are plenty of them as listed below (not in any specific order):

• 1password
• dashlane
• lastpass
• keepass
• bitwarden
• …

Most of them offer free or premium features but the basic is helping you to create strong passwords (embedded generator with choice of length, type of characters), store them in a password protected database (the unique password you have to remember and must not forget !!), database which can be synced between your different devices (computers or mobile). It also fill-in these info when required when you browse whatever browser you use thanks to plugins.

I started using one 8 years ago and I never came back.

Now, I won’t give you any recommendations on the one you should choose, there are a lot of comparisons online. Here, I’m just saying I’m using Bitwarden and the self-hosted version of Bitwarden.

It brings me all the features I just described above and the database where I store everything sits with me on a home server and not on any hard disk on an unknown server somewhere in the world.

So here is the installation guide for the self-hosted version of Bitwarden on a Synology