So. I tried bitwarden for a while with 2fa. I absolutely did not realize that if you lose your 2fa you are done in that service. So yeah. Time to rebuild.
I’m attempting to go all in on proton stuff ATM. Drive, email, vpn and password manager.
What’s the easiest way to set everything up in a way that the whole system is safe and that minimizes the chance of me locking myself out ?
Stuff like. Do I bother with 2fa? What are yubikeys. Are these the answer? Do I 2fa all.accounts other than the protonmail one ?
Long single use case passwords or memorizable ones ?
Do I do throwaway emails or everything signs up to my main one ?
Sorry if I overloaded questions. But id love go get insight from people with more experience.
Edit. And oh. Threat model.
Id love yo not lose accounts if someone physically steals one of my devices.
I’d love to not get hsckdd online by someone random that is not targeting me specifically
And in broad strokes. I’d like to keep all my accounts as private as possible from private companies and governments. But im flexible on this one if its too much hassle.
I would heavily recommend that you don’t put all your eggs in the same basket ESPECIALLY when it comes to a password manager. If youre going to use Proton Pass, make a separare email for that.
To answer the next question, yes you do bother with 2FA ESPECIALLY for a password manager. I mean, you are literally storing like 30 or however many passwords, pretty much your entire digital life there. Do you think it is a good idea to have only one form of verification, one that can be easily cracked through a data breach, to hold all of your passwords? There is a reason why services like banks force you into 2FA when it comes to online banking. And you won’t have to worry about locking yourself out as long as you backup your 2FA tokens, and also keep a copy or two of the recovery codes, preferrably in an encrypted file container on a computer and a usb drive.
Next question: use long pass phrases. Something like: Fediverse-American-Samsung-Electric-Hydro-Synth, you get the point. It is easier to remember than a password.
Use email aliases as much as you can. Simplelogin and Anonaddy are the two best recommendations. The less your real email is visible, the chances of it being in a breach is lower.
As for your threat model, if you don’t want to get hacked, do pretty much as I said above. Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket, use a password manager with a strong passphrase and 2fa enabled. Enable 2fa for as many services as possible and make backups and keep the recovery codes safe. Use email aliases to mask your real email.
I’ll add to all this excellent advice by emphasising on keeping good offline backups and up-to-date backups of everything, especially password manager, 2FA seed code and any recovery codes/keys/phrase (if kept outside of your password manager).
Keep backups off-site too. Have a plan for the wosrt case.
Edit: formatting.
I’m really concerned about putting a 2fa on a pw managed and locking myself out of it again.
Use a 2fa authenticator app, Raivo if you are on iOS, Aegis if you are on Android. They both allow you to create backups of the tokens. And then also keep a safe backup of the recovery codes that are given to you after you complete the 2fa.
It’s better to be locked out of your password manager and just reset your password for all your accounts, than to have every single one of your accounts get hacked and possibly NEVER get them back.
Be careful with the backups though, there’s a good chance you have 2FA enabled on your Google drive
So basically if you lose your phone you can’t access your 2FA app, if you can’t access your 2FA you can’t open your Google Drive, which means you can’t ever get the backup
Other than disabling 2FA I’m not really sure on the best approach to get around this