- So it's been a little over a year now
since my bank account was hacked
and I first started using 1Password to secure myself online.
And if that's happened to you before,
you know just how terrible and invasive
it feels to be hacked.
Well, I've been using the software daily over the past year
and in this review,
I wanna share with you the things that I like
and I don't like about 1Password,
give you a quick look at the desktop and the mobile apps
and finish by discussing the security risks involved.
Hi, I'm Josh and if you're new to this channel,
I'm a huge advocate for personal online security.
Now you're obviously in the market
for a password manager app
and 1Password is one of a handful of different companies
that have a good reputation in this market.
Now if you've never used a password manager before,
1Password is like every other piece of software
and that it helps you to create strong, excellent passwords
and it stores those passwords in a secure vault
behind a single master password.
It syncs that vault between different devices,
whether that's your computer,
your tablet
or your phone
and finally it monitors the health of your password profile.
That's what it does.
However, every password manager takes a different approach
in how it accomplishes this.
I'm gonna explain a few features that I like
and don't like about 1Password
but if you'd rather jump ahead to the tour of the software,
you can do so using the time marker you see here.
Let's start with one of my favorite features in 1Password,
the Family Plan.
What this means is that my Family Plan
covers all members of my family
which could include my parents, my wife, my sister, my kids,
any other immediate of the family members.
We can each have our own private vault
and then share a family vault.
The shared vault could store passwords we might use
such as Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus.
Another unique feature of 1Password
is something known as Travel Mode.
Now for those of you who travel internationally,
this could be something useful for you.
You have the ability to go in
and mark certain vaults as safe for travel.
It then removes those vaults from my devices
that might be extra sensitive while I'm traveling
and when I return, I can reinstall those vaults.
This gives me confidence that my data can't be compromised
even if I'm forced to unlock my device,
which I have been forced to do
while traveling internationally before.
And finally I wanna point out
the Watchtower feature in 1Password.
Most password managers have a similar feature,
but I really like how 1Password has developed Watchtower.
This is something that helps you
monitor the health of your password.
It tells you if you have weak passwords,
it tells you if you have duplicated passwords,
it tells you if there are certain logins
that allow you to have two-factor authentication
that you may or may not be using.
And best of all, Watchtower monitors external breaches
to let you know if any of your current logins
have been compromised in any way and need to be changed.
So for example, the U.S. department store, Target
had a data breach a few years ago.
Well, Watchtower notified users
that the Target information had been compromised
and they needed to change their passwords.
Now, there are two things that I wish I could change
about 1Password that I'll share with you here.
First, I wish there was a free version of 1Password
similar to how Dashlane offers a limited
but still a free version.
Now 1Password does have a 30 day free trial,
but it's not the same
and I think it could be done better.
Secondly, I wish that I had the option
to purchase the software
and maybe even future upgrades later
instead of having to be forced into a subscription model.
I know many people
who would much rather store their password vault locally
on their computer
as opposed to passing it onto the 1Password servers.
Now, 1Password does offer this
as an advanced feature option to store it locally,
but you still have to pay for the subscription service.
This was a business decision
that was obviously made with profits in mind
and not the end user.
Okay, before we cover the important security features,
let me give you a quick tour of the software,
both on desktop and mobile.
On my computer,
I've installed both the app
and the browser extension for Firefox,
which I use instead of Chrome for security reasons.
Now, I'm gonna show you both,
but to be honest,
I use the browser extension a whole lot more
than I do the actual app.
So we'll start with the app.
Obviously I'm going to have to put in my master password
to get in,
but once we do, I've got access to my private vault
and the shared vault that you see here.
So the private vault is the one that's specifically for me
and the shared one's the one that I share with my wife
and any other family members.
So within this vault,
you've got your favorites here on the left,
you've got your Watchtower,
which we'll walk through,
which we've already walked through, I should say.
And then different categories where I've got logins,
I keep secure notes.
If I had any credit cards,
which I don't put any credit cards in my 1Password account,
identities, any documents and then passports.
I keep all the passport information for our family
in here as well.
Now, when you look in at the different preferences,
what you'll see here
is that you've got your general preferences
to show 1Password in the menu bar
and different keyboard shortcuts.
There's, you can open 1Password to suggestions,
but really the importance that you need to think about
with the preferences is the security.
Do you wanna allow the Touch ID?
Which I do.
I like being able to use my Touch ID for my laptop
and I like using Face ID for my mobile devices.
Do you wanna conceal your passwords?
Yes.
Auto lock and how long we lock for.
We've got, I've only got one account.
How I set up my Watchtower,
I do check for two-factor authentication
'cause I do like to use it.
You can check for vulnerable passwords.
You can ask before checking for a secure connection.
And then of course all the different things
related to the vaults.
Always open all the vaults
or I can just open the private vault if I wanted to
and then, which is the default.
My default is I'm always gonna save to my private vault
unless I say otherwise.
The browser, I like using the browser as I said before.
I'll show you that in just a moment.
And then how do we check for updates?
And I like to automatically check and use the updates.
And the advanced features.
This is something that allows you
to put your local vault here on your computer
so that you're not necessarily syncing it
to the 1Password servers.
You can, for the sorting,
you can show numbers and symbols first.
These are, some of these are just,
I don't necessarily call them advanced.
I would say that they're mostly unnecessary
unless you are specifically wanting to do something
and integrating a third party app, for example.
But most of the time, like I said,
this is not an app that I open up and use.
What I would normally use would be Firefox.
So I'm gonna open up Firefox.
Let's say I wanna get into Trello.
So I'm gonna open up Trello
and I'm going to log in.
Now, I already have, if you see right here,
this is my, I've already unlocked it,
but this is my browser extension up here
that's in Firefox.
So what's gonna happen is when I click on the email,
it's going to give me one
that I can automatically autofill
and when I click that,
it's going to autofill it with the password
and the email address
and then I can just log in.
On the flip side,
I can also use the 1Password browser extension
to create a password here.
So if I was creating a password
for this test account in Trello,
I could actually go in and say generate a password
and then it would generate that
and automatically prompt me to save that in my private
or I could save it in my shared vault.
It's really up to me.
Well the mobile app works very similar to the extension
and then it mostly works in the background.
Once I've set it up,
when I want to log into an account,
I just click on this password
and it uses either my password, my master password,
which I have to type in
or a biometric ID, which could be my Face ID
to autofill the password.
Now let's open up the actual app on my iPad
so you can see what that looks like.
Okay, we're gonna start by launching the 1Password App
which uses my Face ID to open and verify my identity.
You can go into the settings and security
if you'd like an advanced security
and change that to be a pin code if you'd like
and so that you'd not using biometric data to do that.
Now, as you saw here within the categories,
we've got space for login, secure notes,
identities, documents, passports,
all the stuff that you had in the desktop app
and it looks exactly the same.
You can still sort it by tags and favorites.
And then in the settings
you've got a lot of different options for security,
when you can lock on exit,
how many minutes before it auto locks,
whether you can use Face ID,
whether Watchtower's enabled.
Autofill, you can use it with Apple Watch,
but it has to be on an iPhone, not an iPad.
I don't have an Apple Watch,
so it doesn't really matter.
And then of course you have advanced features
where you can import a vault,
allow custom keyboards,
or as I showed you, a few extra security features.
Okay, I'd like to shift focus
to address the concerns that most people have
about trusting all of their most sensitive password data
to one company
and 1Password security.
While 1Password
has a number of security features
that work in the background
while you're browsing the internet
and most of the time you won't even know
that you're being protected from a threat,
the most important thing that most people wanna talk about
is the encryption of their password vault.
The best way that I can explain this
is that 1Password has designed three layers of protection.
The first layer is your master password
which gets you access to your vault.
Only you know this
so theoretically, 1Password can't access your vault
even though it's on their servers.
But the second is a security key
that is stored on each device
that is set up as a trusted device with 1Password.
It's almost like a second master password
that only your device knows
and both passwords have to be present
in order to unlock the vault.
You know, in those movies
where the two keys have to be inserted and turned
in order to verify a missile launch?
Well, it's the same here.
Both you and your device
have to provide these secret keys and master password
in order to verify and unlock the vault.
The final layer of security
is what 1Password calls
secure remote password,
which is just a complicated way
of saying that they encrypt the data
between your device and the 1Password servers.
All of this is designed
to make you feel secure about using 1Password
and storing all of your passwords in their vault
and they've done a good job,
but there's nothing you can do to convince me
that a piece of software or an encryption is hack proof.
You can call me paranoid, I don't care.
I will never put all of my eggs in one security basket
and that's why I add an extra layer of protection
in a form of a double-blind password.
Now I've gone into a deep explanation of that in this video
that I highly recommend you watch,
but the short version is that even if somebody were to hack
into my 1Password vault,
the passwords that are there are not my actual passwords.
They don't work.
All right, so final verdict time.
Is 1Password really a great password manager app?
I've been using it religiously over the past year
and I can honestly say that I think it is.
If you're still writing down your passwords
or repeating the same passwords for multiple logins,
do yourself a favor and just try 1Password for 30 days.
I have links in the description below.
They are affiliate links,
but it's a good thing to try and it's worth the effort.
Passwords are the key to our digital front door
and it might be time that you upgrade your lock.
Thanks for watching.
Please like this 1Password review,
subscribe to the All Things Secured channel
and if you have questions about 1Password,
I encourage you to leave them in the comments below
and I'll do my best to answer every single one of them.