Every one of us has plenty of passwords: FTP, forums, banking, e-mail, corporate computers, VPN, personal computers, multiplayer games, and more. How can we manage all these? Is there an easy and secure way?
All of us have more passwords than we can remember, and these passwords should not be an easy-guess. Creating passwords with easy to find information like birthdays, anniversaries, and telephone numbers is leaving all your doors open to the bad guys. Don’t think so? OK, go to a social networking site such as Facebook. Check out a profile whose birthday is displayed. Now, open up Gmail and try this person’s name/surname combination with his/her birthdate. After spending some time, you will be amazed with the number of matches you can find. On the other hand, passwords like “t1ag/dtd” or “s23.r5t!” are not easily remembered (sorry, easily forgot). What should we do? Create one password and use for all sites? Don’t even think about it. That’s like putting all your eggs to the same basket.
The answer to all these questions is password management software. There are lots of them, but as always we want to find the one that suits all our needs. Before going on with downloading and installation, let’s make a checklist and see what we want:
- Safe storage: All password management programs have cryptology embedded; SHA, Blowfish, Twofish, and AES are some of the algorithms used. Plus, the software should be capable of hiding passwords, meaning that when you are copying/pasting passwords they should also be encrypted in the clipboard.
- Portability: We are going mobile everyday. The password management program better be portable (carried on a USB stick for example). None of us want to go anywhere without our passwords.
- Exporting passwords: The password manager should be able to export passwords, at least to a text file. This will come in handy when you are moving to a new system/formatting/using multiple systems etc..
- Generating passwords: This will come in handy when you run out of “rememberable” passwords.
- Integrating with web forms: The software has to remember the information/passwords you put into the web forms.
Now that we have our checklist, let’s see KeePassX first and then HandyPassword.
