[Nifty3929]

I love BitWarden, but coincidentally yesterday I saw a problem pop up on Reddit that was terrifying: There is a known issue where changing your master password can cause you to lose all your data:

https://bitwarden.com/help/account-encryption-key/#rotate-yo...

What?!

Of course, if you are careful and follow all the instructions, in theory you could avoid this. But why allow such a foot-gun?

[klabb3]

> When you rotate an encryption key, you must immediately log out of any logged-in sessions on Bitwarden client applications (Desktop App, Browser Extension, Mobile App, etc). […]

> Making changes in a session with a "stale" encryption key will cause data corruption that will make your data unrecoverable.

I love Bitwarden but this is just… borderline hilarious. Laughing nervously. God damn it, don’t write a damn “help” article about it, create a P0 bug, fix it asap and write a post-mortem.

Field report: I tried to see this UX in action and while it is indeed bad, there are some redeeming factors:

- By default, you don’t rotate encryption key when you change master password. This is opt-in. I’m not qualified to say whether this is a good default or not.

- If you do, a full modal warning pops up explaining to log out or wait an hour:

- They invalidate the sessions automatically, but this is delayed.

AIUI you have to tick the box, not read the warning, hurry to a different device and modify the vault, and have pissed off the cache invalidation gods all at the same time to reach corruption.

[aynawn]

Agreed. It should at least log you out of all sessions without you having to do it yourself. This is good to know if I ever want to rotate my encryption key. Knowing this, I may even log out of all sessions even if I was rotating my master key.