I’m wondering if it isn’t better to just whitelist cookies for the sites I need to log into and not bother with a password manager extension (keepasxc or bitwarden). I try to keep the number of extensions in my browser to a minimum to lower the attack surface. And why involve one more entity in the password story? Are there any problems with using the (1st party) cookies of sites I have signed up to and use to keep me signed in?
well, off i understand you correctly, you want to just stay logged in and never bother with the password in your device? That comes with a heap of problems:
- what if someone else gains access to your device, they’d have instant access to all your accounts
- what if your device died? If you don’t know the passwords you can never log in on anything else.
- if you whitelist cookies those sites could track you across other sites, thus INCREASING your attack surface
Thanks for your response. Points 1 and 2 would be the same if I used an in browser password manager. I backup all passwords on my desktop manager and my laptop is pretty hard to break into. For point 3, do 1st party cookies track people? I thought they were mostly benign and for site settings.
No, one and two are not the same. Your PM is not unlocked unless you enter that master password and it will lock after some time period. Many common PMs sync too. Plus you should be using 2FA. If you care about security avoid auto login.
Yeah, I was thinking of browser PM with auto signin. But I’m dropping all that now. I wonder why these privacy and security focused browsers like Brave include options like this if they are bad for users.
I use a desktop password manager and don’t bother with an extension most of the time
This is what I was doing before I switched to cookies for convenience. I will be going back to this now.