How many KDF iterations did you set your vault to? I have mine at 600,000 so it definitely takes a moment (~3 sec) to decrypt on older devices.
The decryption being compute heavy is by design. You only need to decrypt once to unlock your vault, but someone brute forcing it would need to decrypt a billion+ times. Increasing compute needed for decryption makes it more expensive to brute force your master password.
In fact, LastPass made the mistake of setting their default iteration count to 1000 before they got breached and got a ton of flak for it.
It doesn’t matter how many passwords you are storing inside. It’s the number of cycles of decryption needed to be performed in order to unlock the vault. More cycles = more time.
You can have an empty vault and it will still be slow to decrypt with a high kdf iteration count/expensive algorithm.
You can think of it as an old fashioned safe with a hand crank. You put in the key and turn the crank. It doesn’t matter if the safe is empty or not, as long as you need to turn the crank 1000 times to open it it WILL be slower than a safe that only needs 10 turns. Especially so if you have a 10 year old (less powerful device) turning the crank.
As someone with quite a few passwords in Bitwarden, I think the amount of passwords very much matters. The search UI seems to try to stuff all entries into a flat list (even though I have folders) and that’s adding lag and slowdown after I’ve already waited for decryption to take place.
It’s not annoying enough for me to look for a fix, but if you add more than a couple hundred passwords, the amount of entries starts to matter.
Hmm… I need to test this out then. I have about 200+ entries across multiple folders, but I’m not seeing much of a slowdown. But then again most of my hardware is pretty good (except for one or two devices).
How many KDF iterations did you set your vault to? I have mine at 600,000 so it definitely takes a moment (~3 sec) to decrypt on older devices.
The decryption being compute heavy is by design. You only need to decrypt once to unlock your vault, but someone brute forcing it would need to decrypt a billion+ times. Increasing compute needed for decryption makes it more expensive to brute force your master password.
In fact, LastPass made the mistake of setting their default iteration count to 1000 before they got breached and got a ton of flak for it.
I stored probably a 20 passwords in bitwarden. Its not so much
It doesn’t matter how many passwords you are storing inside. It’s the number of cycles of decryption needed to be performed in order to unlock the vault. More cycles = more time.
You can have an empty vault and it will still be slow to decrypt with a high kdf iteration count/expensive algorithm.
You can think of it as an old fashioned safe with a hand crank. You put in the key and turn the crank. It doesn’t matter if the safe is empty or not, as long as you need to turn the crank 1000 times to open it it WILL be slower than a safe that only needs 10 turns. Especially so if you have a 10 year old (less powerful device) turning the crank.
As someone with quite a few passwords in Bitwarden, I think the amount of passwords very much matters. The search UI seems to try to stuff all entries into a flat list (even though I have folders) and that’s adding lag and slowdown after I’ve already waited for decryption to take place.
It’s not annoying enough for me to look for a fix, but if you add more than a couple hundred passwords, the amount of entries starts to matter.
Hmm… I need to test this out then. I have about 200+ entries across multiple folders, but I’m not seeing much of a slowdown. But then again most of my hardware is pretty good (except for one or two devices).
Seems like it’s a you/your specific phone problem. Everyone else says it runs well. I have like 130 saved entries on mine and no lag.