Bitwarden Security and Compliance
Bitwarden envisions a world where no one gets hacked. This is reflected in a steadfast Bitwarden commitment to security, privacy, and compliance with international standards.
Bitwarden privacy and product security
Third-party audited
External experts regularly review Bitwarden products, ensuring strong and trusted security.
Zero-knowledge, end-to-end encryption
Secured with strong encryption, no one has access to your vault information, not even Bitwarden!
Compliant with privacy and security standards
Get Bitwarden products quickly approved by your internal IT and security teams with industry compliance.
Trust and transparency powered by open source
An open source codebase enables the security of Bitwarden products to be easily audited by independent security researchers, notable security firms, and the Bitwarden community.
Trusted open source architecture
The Bitwarden codebase on GitHub is regularly reviewed and audited by millions of security enthusiasts and active Bitwarden community members.
Source code assessment
Bitwarden completes annual source code audits and penetration tests for each client including web, browser extension, and desktop — in addition to the core application and library.
Network security assessment
Bitwarden completes annual network security assessments and penetration tests by reputable security firms.
HackerOne bug bounty
Independent security researchers are rewarded for submitting potential security issues.
Keeping your data secure
As your password manager and credential security provider, Bitwarden utilizes trusted security measures and encryption methods to protect user data.
Zero-knowledge, end-to-end encryption
Bitwarden uses end-to-end encryption for all vault data, which only your master password can decrypt. With a zero-knowledge architecture, Bitwarden does not have the ability to read any encrypted data in your vault.
Multifactor encryption
Multifactor encryption is an additional layer of encryption that protects your stored information. This makes it practically impossible for a bad actor to break into your vault, even if they were able to gain access to your encrypted vault data.
Self-hosting options
Choose to deploy and manage Bitwarden on-premises in your private network or infrastructure with self-hosting options. Self-hosting allows customers to have more detailed control over their stored information.
Learn about Bitwarden security, privacy, and compliance.
Security compliance
Bitwarden adheres to industry security standards with SOC2 and SOC3 certifications and HIPAA compliance.
SOC2 and SOC3
System and Organization Controls (SOC) comprise a set of control frameworks that are used to validate an organization’s security systems and policies. Bitwarden is SOC2 Type II and SOC3 certified.
HIPAA
Bitwarden is HIPAA compliant and undergoes annual third-party audits for HIPAA Security Rule compliance.
Privacy compliance
Bitwarden prioritizes protecting the personal data of users and ensuring compliance with key privacy standards across the globe.
CCPA & CPRA
Bitwarden is compliant with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA).
GDPR
Bitwarden complies with GDPR, current EU data protection rules, and EU Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs).
Learn more about Bitwarden commitment to data privacy in the data privacy framework.
FAQs
No.
Your data is fully encrypted and/or hashed before ever leaving your local device, so no one from the Bitwarden team can ever see, read, or reverse engineer to get to your real data. Bitwarden servers only store encrypted and hashed data. For more information about how your data is encrypted, see Encryption.
Bitwarden takes extreme measures to ensure that its websites, applications, and cloud servers are secure. Bitwarden uses Microsoft Azure managed services to manage server infrastructure and security, rather than doing so directly.
Bitwarden regularly conducts comprehensive third-party security audits with notable security firms. These annual audits include source code assessments and penetration testing across Bitwarden IPs, servers, and web applications.
If for some reason Bitwarden were to get hacked and your data was exposed, your information is still protected due to strong encryption and one-way salted hashing measures taken on your vault data and master password.
Bitwarden processes and stores all vault data securely in the Microsoft Azure Cloud in the US or EU using services that are managed by the team at Microsoft. Since Bitwarden only uses service offerings provided by Azure, there is no server infrastructure to manage and maintain. All uptime, scalability, security updates, and guarantees are backed by Microsoft and their cloud infrastructure. Review the Microsoft Azure Compliance Offerings documentation for more detail.
You can trust us for a few reasons:
Bitwarden is open source software. All of our source code is hosted on GitHub and is free for anyone to review. Thousands of software developers follow Bitwarden's source code projects (and you should too!).
Bitwarden is audited by reputable third-party security firms as well as independent security researchers.
Bitwarden does not store your passwords. Bitwarden stores encrypted versions of your passwords that only you can unlock. Your sensitive information is encrypted locally on your personal device before ever being sent to our cloud servers.
Bitwarden has a reputation. Bitwarden is used by millions of individuals and businesses. If we did anything questionable or risky, we would be out of business!
Still don't trust us? You don't have to. Open source is beautiful. You can easily host the entire Bitwarden stack yourself. You control your data.
PBKDF2 SHA-256 is used to derive the encryption key from your master password, however you may choose Argon2 as an alternative. Bitwarden salts and hashes your master password with your email address locally, before transmission to our servers. Once a Bitwarden server receives the hashed password, it is salted again with a cryptographically secure random value, hashed again, and stored in our database.
Bitwarden always encrypts and/or hashes your data on your local device before anything is sent to cloud servers for storage. Bitwarden servers are only used for storing encrypted data. For more information, see Storage.
All vault data is encrypted by Bitwarden before being stored anywhere. To learn how, see Encryption.
Data that is stored on your computer/device is encrypted and only decrypted when you unlock your vault. Decrypted data is stored in memory only and is never written to persistent storage.