Bio

I’ve written this in 3rd person, let me know if you want anything from this to be changed.

Tanay started using Linux distros around 15 years back, which is almost for half his life. Ever since the time he started using FOSS, he started falling more and more in love with FOSS as time passed. Right now, after multiple distro hops he has ended up with using Arch Linux as his daily driver Linux distro. He also contributes to source code occasionally. Tanay loves 2D game programming, and occasionally writes small and fun games as a hobby. By being a passionate software engineer he highly advocates good programming practices and professional environments. Recently, Tanay has started playing around with data engineering and exploring this new field. He also has experience organising tech events like meetups and conferences.

Abstract

A lot of people use password managers which are proprietary. They are closed source and therefore you can't know how it encrypts and stores your passwords. In addition to this, your passwords are sent over the network to the server/cloud. While all of this appears to be out of control to end user, there are open source alternatives to this. The open source alternative that I have used heavily in the past for a couple of years is KeePassXC. While KeePassXC saves the passwords locally I use another open source synchronising tool called Syncthing which is also free and opensource. In this talk we will discuss how and why this open source alternative is better than the proprietary ones that we use.

Outline

1. Intro to password managers (1 minutes)

We will talk about what password managers are. Why we use them and how they are  better than just remembering out passwords

1. Problems with proprietary password managers (1 minutes)

There are a lot of proprietary password managers out there eg: 1password, LastPass, Dashlane, Keeper, NordPass etc. We will discuss the problems with using these due to their nature of being closed source.

1. Intro to KeePassXC as a password manager and its features Features of KeePassXC (5 minutes)

Here we will introduce KeePassXC as an alternative password manager. We will again discuss the pros and cons of this password manager. We will see how with KeePassXC we can use a hardware key to improve the security.

1. Using Syncthing to synchronise across devices (5 Minutes)

Since KeePassXC does not have a cloud synchronisation built into it. We will therefore use Syncthing which will help us Synchronise the passwords database across all our devices.

1. Live demo (5 minutes)

Reference URLs

1. KeePassXC
2. Syncthing