pwsafe
There are very few times when I find a utility that may just change my life — and I think I just found one.
Like many of you reading this, I have many passwords to keep track of. Whether it’s for banking or just a throw-away site, having different passwords is important. I used to use Keyring on my Palm but then my Palm died, so I was without a password manager.
This weekend I stumbled onto Password Safe, originally developed by security guru Bruce Schneier. It stores the info using the Blowfish algorithm. And it is open source, which makes it even better (price-wise and security-wise). The downside? It’s Windows-based.
But fear not! There is a Unix version that is command-line based — even better! It’s called pwsafe and it’s everything that I needed in a password safe. And it’s also compatable with the Windows version, so you can trade the password files back and forth. And when it defaults to generating passwords that look like \d>fismze2zveoh6ms7dp?xiJk1l~wzA&hgt;s+u , you know that the passwords are quite random. Of course, most sites don’t allow passwords that long or complex.
So, if you have many passwords to keep track of, or worse, are using the same password for many sites, get a password safe and keep your accounts tidy and secure.
October 24th, 2005 at 11:37 am
I’ve been using Password Safe (on Windows) for about 1 year now. It works well, but I would really like to have an easier interface, and one where I could use it from anywhere I choose, which pretty much means a web-based solution. Of course then the problem is the inherit lack of security.
October 24th, 2005 at 11:41 am
That’s why I like pwsafe — I can use it over ssh on my home machine.