Forgot my master pasword. Reset possible?

I Forgot my password due to the fingerprint access I already use for 2 years :sweat_smile: and also my Hint asks me for an answer, I can write in different ways.
I can’t get in anymore. Is there a way to reset my password?

This is one of the problems of Bitwarden. They don’t ask us for the master password periodically to prevent us from forgetting the password. I don’t think there is anything you can do.

If there were a way to reset the password, I would expect that the security guarantees BW is giving us would not hold. Specifically, if the Bitwarden folks can reset your master password, then they also can read everything in your vault.

Oh, and the help answers the very question being asked here:

Unlike most services that you use on the internet, due to the way Bitwarden works there is no way to reset your master password in the event that you forget it.

I do wish there were more attention paid to establishing contingencies for preventing the loss of a master password. Note that I’m not complaining about BW itself. Maybe there are features that could be added but it seems to me if the community could start with some possible practices, that would be useful too. (I hate to call them “best practices” because which practice is best really depends on the situation of the user. I describe below one approach, which I do not claim will work for everyone. As always, it is a matter of trade offs.)

I’ve read some previous discussion about BW and the possibility of not being able to recall the master password, not because of lack of practice but because a memory problem. I’ve seen quite a few glib answers that implied that people either have normal memory or they are vegetables. The implication being that if you cannot remember a master password because your memory is failing, then surely you also don’t know where you live, or how to tie your shoes, or your own name, or anything else.

However, the ability to recall things is more complex than than. For one thing, we have different types of memory. The memory of how to do things is not the same memory as the memory of my life story. And memory loss can be temporary, caused by a condition that is being treated, or by a medicine which has for side-effect to affect memory. Sometimes the side-effect stops after a while or if not, then another medicine can be tried.

So it could definitely happen that a user of BW could for a while be unable to remember the master password. What then?

The way I’ve set it up for my wife and I was to create an organization. It has a few entries that are really neither mine or hers (e.g. wifi passwords), and it has two entries: one is for if I become disabled, the other is for if she becomes disabled. They contain enough information for each of us to be able to recover the other’s master password. The information is useless if the person using it is not physically in our house. (So if someone were to be able to grab my vault, they don’t also automatically get hers.) And no, that does not mean that I’ve taped the passwords under my office desk. It’s more complicated than that and nobody can just stumble upon it. :slight_smile:

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There is no way to reset the password, no way to access the account other than to remember the password. This is by design for security reasons.

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sorry but this is precisely why many people choose Bitwarden: because they have a zero-knowledge protocol. They don’t want to know your password, and we don’t want them to know it.

Furthermore, I also thought we’re provided a long string to write down and keep safe when 2FA is activated; something like 32 random characters?

Next time maybe paper printout and a safe deposit box? :frowning:

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…one of the excellent strengths of Bitwarden… :wink:

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The problem is, I can get in on my phone with my fingerprint, but it doesn’t let you export or view or change your password without knowing it. There should be some way around that