Understand Log In vs. Unlock

In order to understand why unlocking and logging in are not the same, it's important to remember that Bitwarden never stores unencrypted data on its servers. When your vault is neither unlocked nor logged in, your vault data only exists on the server in its encrypted form.

Logging in to Bitwarden retrieves the encrypted vault data and decrypts the vault data locally on your device. In practice, that means two things:

1. Logging in will always require you to use your master password or login with device to gain access to the account encryption key that will be needed to decrypt vault data.
   
   This stage is also where any enabled two-step login methods will be required.

2. Logging in will always require you to be connected to the internet (or, if you are self-hosting, connected to the server) to download the encrypted vault to disk, which will subsequently be decrypted in your device's memory.
   

Unlocking can only be done when you are already logged in. This means, according to the above section, your device has encrypted vault data stored on disk. In practice, this means two things:

1. You don't specifically need your master password. While your master password can be used to unlock your vault, so can other methods like PIN codes and biometrics.

   note

   PINまたは生体認証を設定すると、PINまたは生体認証要素から派生した新しい暗号化キーが使用されて、アカウント暗号化キーを暗号化し、ログインしているためにアクセスでき、ディスク上にª保存されます。

   ロック解除すると、保管庫はメモリ内のアカウント暗号化キーをPINまたは生体認証キーで復号化します。復号化されたアカウント暗号化キーは、メモリ内のすべての保管庫データを復号化するために使用されます。

   ロック すると、復号化された保管庫のデータ全体、復号化されたアカウントの暗号化キーを含む、が削除されます。

   ª - 再起動時にマスターパスワードでロックオプションを使用すると、このキーはディスクではなくメモリにのみ保存されます。

2. You don't need to be connected to the internet (or, if you are self-hosting, connected to the server).