Item and vault counts

AGAlumB

This discussion was created from comments split from: having nothing but problems with families, my wife and I want separate accounts.

XIII

I checked your account and it does look like all the items are in your Personal vault.

First let me apologize for hijacking this topic, but can you please explain how you were able to do this?

I thought vaults are encrypted and cannot be inspected without knowing the master password?

tommyent

@XIII not everything is encrypted. You can read the whitepaper to see what is not. Around page 41 shows database tables and unencrypted data

AGAlumB

@XIII: Indeed, tommyent is on the right track, and I'm glad you asked!

While 1Password's data is encrypted, the database structure means that it isn't just a continuous string of ones and zeros. Vaults are broken down separately (and therefore quantifiable) because of course not everyone will have access to each of them, but we need a way to share a discrete vault with specific individuals. So an account will show a vault count.

Similarly, while item sharing isn't a thing, it's something we'd like to be able to do in the future, so those are discrete as well. And also items are encrypted individually when they're created, and they need to be able to be decrypted individually so 1Password doesn't have to to decrypt an entire vault — or all of your data — just to grant you access to a single item. So each vault has an item count as well.

And the entire structure also enables things like auditing, and makes data transfer and performance much more efficient. Definitely an interesting topic, so I hope you don't mind me splitting this off into a discussion of its own. Let me know if you have any other questions! :)

XIII

Thanks for the explanation and the link to the whitepaper.

I guess I was confusing 1Password and LastPass (where I believe everything is one binary blob to the company behind it).

nmott

I'm glad Brenty's explanation was helpful!