1password-linux-to-bitwarden VS mkcert

They have been doing some pretty unfriendly moves towards their long-term customers, like making sure the new 1Password cannot be used without 'the cloud' like the old one could be.

I have no doubt raising more VC money will only accelerate such trends.

In fact I've decided to move off of 1Password to BitWarden, since at least one can realistically self-host it. That being said, it's not exactly easy to migrate from the latest 1Password so I wrote my own little utility to do it[1].

I think we need more competition to VC backed products in general, just imagine what would happen if the building blocks of say a GNU/Linux system we take for granted today would've been built with the mindset that investors are going to want a return on their investment.

I am not saying there's anything wrong with that in principle, but am not sure I want to surrender my passwords to these kinds of incentives.

1 - https://github.com/MatejLach/1password-linux-to-bitwarden

By looking at the decoder of the tool linked in this post, it's just a zip that contains .data files, which are JSON. Still, hiding known file formats (.zip, .json) behind some obscure names (.1pux and .data) does look like a shady pattern to me.

There are compiled version available: 1.0 - initial binary release

The author mentions difficulties with HTTPS and trying stuff locally.

I've had some success with mkcert [1] to easily create certificates trusted by browsers, I can suggest to look into this. You are your own root CA, I think it can work without an internet connection.

[1] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert/

Solution: mkcert – Your Zero-Configuration HTTPS Enabler Meet mkcert, a user-friendly, zero-configuration tool designed for creating locally-trusted development certificates. Find it on its GitHub page and follow the instructions tailored for your operating system. For Mac users employing Homebrew, simply execute the following commands in your terminal:

Well, Certifi does not ship with your company's certificates! So requesting internal services may come with additional painful extra steps! Also for a local development environment that uses mkcert for example!

My project, getlocalcert.net[1] may be the one you're thinking of.

Since I'm also building in this space, I'll give my perspective. Local certificate generation is complicated. If you spend the time, you can figure it out, but it's begging for a simpler solution. You can use tools like mkcert[2] for anything that's local to your machine. However, if you're already using ACME in production, maybe you'd prefer to use ACME locally? I think that's what Anchor offers, a unified approach.

There's a couple references in the Anchor blog about solving the distribution problem by building better tooling[3]. I'm eager to learn more, that's a tough nut to crack. My theory for getlocalcert is that the distribution problem is too difficult (for me) to solve, so I layer the tool on top of Let's Encrypt certificates instead. The end result for both tools is a trusted TLS certificate issued via ACME automation.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674224

2. https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

3. https://blog.anchor.dev/the-acme-gap-introducing-anchor-part...

Looks like step-ca/step-cli [1] and mkcert [2] have been mentioned. Another related tool is XCA [3] - a gui tool to manage CAs and server/client TLS certificates. It takes off some of the tedium in using openssl cli directly. It also stores the certs and keys in an encrypted database. It doesn't solve the problem of getting the root CA certificate into the system store or of hosting the revocation list. I use XCA to create and store the root CA. Intermediate CAs signed with it are passed to other issuers like vault and step-issuer.

[1] https://smallstep.com/docs/step-ca/

[2] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

[3] https://hohnstaedt.de/xca/

We use mkcert for this, it works wonderfully.

https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

mkcert: This is used to obtain a trusted TLS certificate with a custom domain name for your development machine. You can install mkcert on your development machine following the official instructions.

I've been pretty frustrated with how private CAs are supported. Your private root CA can be maliciously used to MITM every domain on the Internet, even though you intend to use it for only a couple domain names. Most people forget to set Name Constraints when they create these and many helper tools lack support [1][2]. Worse, browser support for Name Constraints has been slow [3] and support isn't well tracked [4]. Public CAs give you certificate transparency and you can subscribe to events to detect mis-issuance. Some hosted private CAs like AWS's offer logs [5], but DIY setups don't.

Even still, there are a lot of folks happily using private CAs, they aren't the target audience for this initial release.

[1] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert/issues/302

[2] https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/issues/3655

[3] https://alexsci.com/blog/name-non-constraint/

[4] https://github.com/Netflix/bettertls/issues/19

[5] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/privateca/latest/userguide/secur...