DESOSA 2021

Bitwarden

Bitwarden (https://bitwarden.com/) is one of the most trusted open source password managers for business. Bitwarden offers the easiest and safest way for teams and individuals to store and share sensitive data from any device.

Bitwarden debuted in August 2016 with an initial release of mobile applications for iOS and Android, browser extensions for Chrome and Opera, and a web vault. The browser extension for Firefox was later launched in February 2017.1

During the last year in the midst of a global pandemic many companies were forced to bring their businesses online. Meetings, documents, whiteboards etc. were all kept in the cloud so each employee could access these from their desk at home. Many of these applications have the employees create an account. The application uses this as authorization to view the company confidential content. The application itself might have sophisticated security measures against cyber breaches, protecting the companies confidential information. But the need to create accounts is a risk unto itself. Employees often use weak or repetitive passwords, these form a weak link in the security of that information.

Creating strong unique passwords is hard enough as it is, remembering them for 10+ different applications is even harder. It is with this reason Bitwarden offers a cross-platform, risk free and easy to use password manager. Ensuring all employees can utilize company defined security measures through a safe application.2

Bitwarden (https://bitwarden.com/) is one of the few open-source password managers out there. This enables every user to investigate and improve on security features that are implemented. Even though Bitwarden is open source it does not cut any corners. It boasts a global community and the application is available in multiple languages. It is also available on any major platform you can think of. All of these features not only make it the password manager of choice for our project members, but for many enterprises as well.

References


  1. Bitwarden. (2021, February 19). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitwarden ↩︎

  2. Bitwarden blog. (2021, February 12). Why password managers are a safe bet for businesses [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://bitwarden.com/blog/post/password-managers-safe-bet-for-business/ ↩︎

Authors

Erik Sennema

Master Student Computer Science with the track Data Science and Technoloy. Great interest in big data, machine learning and distributed systems.

Jip Rietveld

Data Science and Technology master student with a love of Algorithmics and Web Science.

Kawin Zheng

Master Student CS Artificial Intelligence Technology track

Daan Hofman

Master Student Computer Science, specialized in Artificial Intelligence Technology

Bitwarden - Architecting software for security

Introduction Bitwarden strives to build a safe and secure password manager that everyone can use1. In our previous posts, we have discussed this vision, how it translates to software design decisions and to the code base of the project. This week we want to lay the focus on the security of the Bitwarden project. As a password manager security is a key component of the Bitwarden product. Users trust the encryption utilized by Bitwarden as well as the company with all of their logins or files.

Bitwarden - Quality and Evolution

Bitwarden strives to build a safe and secure password manager that everyone can use1. In our previous posts we discussed this vision and how such a vision translates itself to a software architecture. This week we will discuss the quality and evolution the Bitwarden software has been through. As a password manager security is a key component of the Bitwarden product. For such a product clean code is not only a system to keep the project maintainable and readable for developers.

Bitwarden - From Vision to Architecture

Main architectural style Bitwarden’s main vision translated into a architectural relevant sentence is as follows: Build a safe and secure password manager that everyone can use 1. In the same slide and presentation, the Bitwarden company states that this lead to four early architectural decisions: Cloud native Scalable Flexible Enterprise friendly These architectural decisions go hand in hand. Making a the system scalable requires making it native to the cloud.

Bitwarden - Product Vision and Problem Analysis

During the last year in the midst of a global pandemic, many companies were forced to bring their businesses online. Meetings, documents and whiteboards were all kept online so each employee could access these from their desk at home. Many of the applications that enable online collaboration require the employees to create an account. The application uses this as authorization to view the company’s confidential content. The application itself might have sophisticated security measures against cyber breaches, protecting the companies confidential information.