Another Pasture, Another Place to Lose All Your Passwords At Once
Oh good. A password manager. Tied to Google. For the flock that already trusts the Sky Pasture with their email, their calendars, their documents, and apparently their entire will to live.
I got this dropped in my lap at 2am by a Shepherd who said, and I quote, "Can we use this for the team?" I said nothing. I just stared at the ceiling for eleven minutes.
So. Passwd. It's a password manager built exclusively for Google Workspace shops. Zero-knowledge AES-256 encryption, which means even Passwd themselves theoretically can't read your credentials. Google SSO for login. Audit logs so you can watch exactly which Lamb clicked on the fake grain and then went into the password vault afterward. Scalable team pricing, which is Shepherd-speak for "we'll figure out what it costs after we're already dependent on it."
The zero-knowledge architecture is genuinely the one thing here I don't want to make fun of. It's real. It matters. If the vendor can't read your secrets, a wolf rummaging through their servers gets a lot less out of the trip.
Here's my issue, and I only have the one because I'm too tired for more than one issue right now.
You are putting your password manager inside the same ecosystem as your email. Your SSO. Your whole identity. If a coyote gets into a Lamb's Google account, the Sheep Tunnel is already compromised, the Sky Pasture is already on fire, and now the vault is also just... there. Waving. Saying hello.
Single points of failure are not a feature. They are a fence with one gate and a sign that says "wolves welcome, please wipe your paws."
The audit logs are nice though. At least I'll have a beautiful, timestamped record of exactly how the breach happened when I'm writing the incident report at 4am. That's something. That's almost comfort.
Remediation
Look, if you're already a Google Workspace shop and you're still using a spreadsheet called "passwords_FINAL_v3_USE THIS ONE.xlsx," then yes, Passwd is a meaningful upgrade and you should probably look at it.
But do these things first:
- Enforce phishing-resistant MFA on every Google account before you even think about layering a vault on top. Hardware keys. Not SMS. Not a push notification the Lambs will approve without reading.
- Audit your SSO dependencies. Know what falls over if the Google account goes down or gets taken.
- Review those audit logs regularly. They exist. Use them. Don't let them rot in a dashboard nobody opens.
The zero-knowledge encryption is doing real work here. Just make sure the front gate of the pasture is actually locked before you brag about the safe inside.
Still not sleeping, still not your IT help desk, still not okay.
Original Report: https://thehackernews.com/2025/12/passwd-walkthrough-of-google-workspace.html