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**Amal Hussein:** So cool. Yeah, so before we get into some of the changes around 1Password, and you've made some exciting architecture changes, like moving to Electron, which is like a Chromium/Node kind of desktop app support system... I don't even know how I could describe Electron in a sentence. But before we get i... |
**Mitchell Cohen:** Absolutely. So at its heart, 1Password is a password manager, and it's since grown to become kind of like an everything manager. Anything you need to keep secret, you need to keep safe. You can put it in 1Password and trust it'll be safe there. And in the past few years, it's expanded to become actu... |
\[08:08\] And the thing that keeps it safe is something that's actually been in the news a lot lately, which is this concept of end-to-end encryption, where regardless of who we are, our relationship to you, we don't have access to the secrets you put in 1Password. We don't even have access to the security keys you wou... |
**Amal Hussein:** That is so cool. |
**Andrew Beyer:** Yeah, the story I like to tell is a lot of people assume - you know, you go to 1Password and you sign up for an account, you're entering your password into this website and they assume, obviously, 1Password has that, right? And that is where we years ago fully embraced web technologies, and with the a... |
**Nick Nisi:** Yeah, so everything is always encrypted going to the -- like, if you're using the Family Plan, or things like that; it's always encrypted, and you have to decrypt it locally, whether that's with the client or in the browser. |
**Andrew Beyer:** Yup, a hundred percent. |
**Mitchell Cohen:** Yeah. And when you mentioned the Family Plan - what's remarkable about that is you can have transactions between two family members where they're able to share with each other, but we have no insight into what they're sharing, and no ability to access it. And it's kind of challenging to set up that ... |
**Nick Nisi:** Wow. |
**Mitchell Cohen:** Yeah. And it's all thanks to private-public key encryption. We basically provision these vaults, they all have separate keys, and then from there, a family member from their own device can essentially ensure other family members have access. So yeah, along the entire way, essentially, it's encryptio... |
**Amal Hussein:** Super-cool. So is this architecture -- and the keys are unique by device, right? So even if I'm one person with two devices, I'm using different keys... How does that work actually, if I'm using the same account across multiple devices? |
**Andrew Beyer:** The keys to unlock your account, or essentially what we call the master unlock key (easily named) is unique to you. It is unique to you and your account. So your account password and your secret key derives the master unlock key. And from there, it's just a whole host of other keys. So you'll have a k... |
We do offer some authentication on top of that, so every device has a unique identifier, and we use that just for the server to know the devices out there that it can download the encrypted blobs of your 1Password items to... And we can do things like multi-factor authentication that way, where you're doing -- the base... |
\[12:08\] And really, the only protection that adds is if someone were to obtain your master unlock key, or your account password and secret key, they can't use that on a new device to download your encrypted information. So it does add kind of a different layer of making sure that nobody can add to, remove from your a... |
**Amal Hussein:** That is so cool. And I'm assuming this architecture pattern has probably replicated across other password managers, but 1Password were the first major player in this space, from my understanding... |
**Mitchell Cohen:** I don't think any of it is fully replicated across anywhere else I've seen. We do document it, it's in our white paper, so people are free to take a look at our whole architecture... But we're really pioneering in so many areas here, especially over the past years, with our sharing features. And hon... |
**Andrew Beyer:** That is one piece of advice - if you aren't using 1Password and you're looking at other one password managers, you really need to dig into the implementation details. Most people don't care about implementation details on stuff... But when it's something where you're relying on it for your entire secu... |
**Amal Hussein:** That makes a lot of sense. Honestly, we could talk about that one topic for the whole show... But we're kind of here to talk about stuff that's changing. So what's changing in 1Password? I think we've kind of alluded to that a little bit with Electron... So can you tell us about what prompted that cha... |
**Mitchell Cohen:** Sure. So we're releasing a new set of desktop apps, and we're calling them 1Password 8, because the previous version was 7. And we did something that probably you should never do, but we did anyway, which is that we wrote all our apps from scratch, starting from the very foundation. We picked our te... |
So that's exactly what we did... We sort of built our new tech stack into these apps, and announced them for early access, and that's where a lot of the interest has been. |
**Nick Nisi:** And to that end, what was it before? My experience has only ever been on Mac and iOS devices, but 1Password has existed on other platforms as well, like Windows and elsewhere. Were those all just separate, native apps for the previous version? |
**Mitchell Cohen:** They were a hodgepodge of different things. And that's true about any sufficiently large piece of software - you end up with all sorts of bits and pieces built over the course of years, kind of connected together. But one issue was that they all felt very different. So the way I started to think abo... |
But the other interesting thing about them is that they also all had web technologies in them, and we always have used web technologies heavily and pioneered them... So as Andrew already alluded to, we used web crypto very early on to power our web service and to make sharing possible over the web. But even on the desk... |
\[16:16\] So it's interesting to see people think of what we're doing as sort of like a move, or a shift, when really it's just taking something we've always cared about deeply and continuing to use it in our product for the things that appeal to us about it. |
**Nick Nisi:** I can see that perspective though, because I -- definitely, when you say that, 90% of my interaction with 1Password is through the browser extensions and command slash to open that up. I guess I just don't ever think about it as like "Well, it's really just this thing", and I'm never really opening up 1P... |
**Mitchell Cohen:** And that's a great observation, because it's something we both notched and heard ourselves, that people were saying "The part of 1Password that I actually use is the part in my web browser." That informed what we're doing with 1Password today, first of all because we wanted to bring some of what mad... |
So one thing we're very excited about with 8 is actually making it so that you do interact with all of our service and our apps, not just the command backslash as useful as it is. So that's really on our minds. |
**Nick Nisi:** How so? How would that change my usage of going to a site and wanting it to auto-populate? How would it bring in the desktop version? |
**Mitchell Cohen:** One example is we actually have a new dashboard for our Watchtower service in the desktop app, that shows you your security situation as a whole, which is something we didn't have before. Now you can see exactly what passwords you need to go fix. The interface helps you understand that and make prog... |
Another would be our sharing features, which - again, the desktop app is a natural place to have sharing; both the ability to share, and also to understand what information is being shared with whom. And a lot more of that is now exposed in the new desktop apps than it was before. |
**Nick Nisi:** Nice. Okay, that makes sense. I did download the early access, and was comparing it to the old version... And I was like, "Oh, this Watchtower thing is cool." I thought that there was that in the old app, but there wasn't... And I really like that dashboard a lot. I only have six terrible passwords, by t... |
**Mitchell Cohen:** Well, that's fantastic... And that's funny too, because we've had several people point out things that they don't like about the new app that weren't in the old, so... It's always interesting to see how people remember what was there versus what they have now, and in some cases the grass is always g... |
**Andrew Beyer:** Yeah. And discoverability was a big piece of this project. We wanted as part of this -- essentially, a complete rewrite of the client app experience. We wanted to make sure that we were building a product that was modern and discoverable in this day and age. And we had a lot of problems there, whether... |
\[20:13\] We've grown in size of just like the ecosystem, the complexity of 1Password adding on memberships and sharing and all of those things, where it's no longer just one individual developer adding something to the app, that they think is a good idea... We have a more well thought out design and engineering proces... |
**Break:** \[20:44\] |
**Amal Hussein:** Alright, y'all, so that was really incredible, learning about some of the reasoning behind those decisions, which really, for me seemed very obvious at this point, right? We've seen successful platforms like Xamarin enable cross- platform development for mobile apps, where you're able to ship to the i... |
**Andrew Beyer:** That is a lot of questions in one question... |
**Amal Hussein:** Sorry... |
**Andrew Beyer:** ...so I will try to start at the beginning, and you let me know which ones I don't answer. Browser extension - great example. And it's actually the origin story for 1Password 8. So a few years ago, I wanna say a few friends got together - and this is one Mitch and I actually worked as developers direc... |
\[24:23\] The other thing is you have this thing called ChromeOS, which is this system -- it runs Android apps sometimes, but it's another place where a lot of things are done on the web, they're done within Chrome... It's a great place where you want a web extension or a browser extension that doesn't need a Mac app r... |
**Nick Nisi:** Did you hear that, Jerod? |
**Andrew Beyer:** ...with browsers just constantly evolving, and JavaScript platforms, and all of that... Holy cow, TypeScript is awesome. So that's kind of like what we at the time branded as 1Password X. We did that because we had two browser extensions; now, with the 1Password 8 transition, this is the browser exten... |
Once you get more than three of these things, or ten, or twenty, or fifty of them, you wanna start sharing them, you wanna start managing them in different ways, you wanna start adding new, different and exciting item types... That's where it really makes sense to download the app, start digging deeper into 1Password. ... |
The cross-platform thing I will push back on a little bit and say that's getting better. It started with Google, they created this thing called Web Extensions. It's not an official platform API. And then Mozilla finally kind of converted over Firefox. Edge for a while were working on this Web Extensions API... What was... |
**Amal Hussein:** That's great. |
**Andrew Beyer:** So I will push back and say - it's not 100% standard across the board, like everything on the web is, but essentially, if you can write something in JavaScript, if you can learn and use the Web Extensions API, you can actually build a web extension or a browser extension that works in all of the major... |
You know, there's a lot of caveats to that, where "Okay, Safari supports this", you've gotta package it into a macOS app and ship it on the Mac App Store... There's all sorts of distribution issues. |
For example, for 1Password we have to work with Google to distribute our browser extension, we have to work with Mozilla to distribute our browser extension, we work with Microsoft to distribute our browser extension, and we work with Apple. So it's pretty much all of the major companies. So it's not as easy as like, y... |
\[28:11\] So I think it is getting better. Security-wise - you are correct. Web extensions, browser extensions, they have a ton of power inside of the browser. This is managed by way of a permissions system, so when you install a browser extension, it'll basically tell you "Here's the creepy permissions that your brows... |
**Amal Hussein:** Nobody reads that. |
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