Password anxieties

In today’s Internet, the community tools are just too many. Forums for all your games, account login pages for your various memberships, mailbox and ISP passwords, FTP login info… so many things to keep secure.

The best thing for everyone to do really is to use the maximum allowed number of characters in the password box AND to use different password for every different login dialog. Yeah, right! Who can remember all that?

Well, your computer can! It’s been some time since I had looked for a good password manager, last time I did I was disappointed. But today I found an OPEN-SOURCE password manager (I’ll explain later why that is important) that works almost transparently. Don’t even fear the almost part, because that is only when you setup a new account/password, after that it is completely transparent.

It is named KeyPass and it uses the latest and highest complexity encryption methods to keep your passwords safe. One of my favorite features is the fact that it does not need an installation, so that allowed me to have it running of my USB flash drive and so I can just carry this with me wherever I go and my passwords will always follow me.

Furthermore, the program can generate totally random passwords for you which you can then use for your accounts. It has a very fancy way of doing that by combining user selected charsets (that means, do you want only numbers, numbers and letters, numbers letters and symbols, etc.) and random mouse movement (translating the way YOU move the mouse into some kind of code that mixes the password characters) to generate an encrypted password of high complexity.

After you make your account and you want to login, all you have to do is click on the Username textbox and click the special key combo (normally Control+Alt+A) and it will fill out the username and password and log you in! Can’t get any simpler than that!

And in case someone steals my USB flash drive it is calculated that the time it would take for all the PCs in the world to crack the database is much longer than the time it would take our Sun to die…

P.S. The fact that KeyPass is OPEN SOURCE means that everyone can see exactly what it does. This DOES NOT mean that it becomes easier to crack your database, but it does mean that everyone can see that it is secure, does not contain any spyware/malware and does not contain any backdoors. It also means that if an error exists, it becomes much faster and easier to detect and fix. Finally, if that doesn’t make much sense, it means that it is free!

5 thoughts on “Password anxieties”

  1. i really had a problem w/ my passwords. i always used the same one (guess the problem i had when it asked for numbers). i found out a way for it, anyway. thanx. you helped a lot 🙂

  2. At LAST! This is one of the most useful things I’ve heard in a WHILE! Running on ALL KINDS of OSs as well! Now I only have to figure out if I can run it on an iPhone… When they arrive in Europe, that is..
    🙁

  3. As far as I know, iPhone is a smart computer phone, running OS X. Doing a bit of guestimation I would dare to say that it will run on iPhone with the memory card in the iPhone acting as the safeguard. Run the KeyPass from the iPhone hard drive and keep around a secondary memory card of the lowest possible capacity to store a backup of the database and the lock-file. That way, should you be so unfortunate as to have it stolen, your simple memory stick will prevent you loosing all your passwords. Of course, you can just keep them on your computer, like I do…

  4. @Geroloofas
    If your looking for more portability, try an online service instead of something that you need to install on (and sync between) various machines. No online password managers have a mobile version yet, but I can guarantee it won’t be long until at least one does [wink].

  5. The problem with online password keeping services is trust, pure and simple. I’d rather have my USB stick always with me (which some people might think is a burden) than trust my passwords to anyone other than myself.

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