Understand Log In vs. Unlock

Bitwarden uses two distinct processes to secure your vault without sacrificing convenience: logging in to your Bitwarden account and unlocking your vault. This separation ensures Bitwarden never stores unencrypted data on its servers. When your vault is not unlocked or 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:

• Logging in always requires your master password, approved device, or created passkey to gain access to the account encryption key that's used to decrypt vault data. Any enabled two-step login methods are also required at this stage.

• Logging in always requires an internet connection (or, if self-hosting, a server connection) to download the encrypted vault to disk. The vault is then decrypted in your device's memory.
  

  note

  After logging in, Bitwarden data will be stored in memory. Once logged in, the unlock feature will allow access to vault data in offline mode (as read-only). Decrypted data is stored in memory and never written to persistent storage. Log out to clear data from the device.

Unlocking your vault is only done when you're 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:

• 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

  When you setup a PIN or biometrics, a new encryption key derived from the PIN or biometric factor is used to encrypt the account encryption key, which you will have access to by virtue of being logged in and stored on disk*.

  Unlocking your vault causes the PIN or biometric key to decrypt the account encryption key in memory. The decrypted account encryption key is then used to decrypt all vault data in memory.

  Locking your vault causes all decrypted vault data, including the decrypted account encryption key, to be deleted.

  *If you use the Require master password on browser restart option, this key is stored only in memory rather than on disk.

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