Password Manager

Have you ever had so many passwords and logins that you couldn’t remember all of them? Chances are if you’ve got that issue, you just use the same password over and over and over again, which studies have shown is not the smartest thing to do. I had come across Password Safe a few years ago, and while it is an excellent MS Windblows product, I run two Linux boxes as well and would love to have a portable ‘safe’ to carry around. I had seen and used Password Gorilla on my linux box a couple of years ago because it used the same encryption and databases as Password Safe. But I recently updated one of my old computers again, now running Fedora Core 6 Linux/GNU, and was looking to install it again… turns out, they’ve ported it to Windows too, and it’s portable… meaning I can keep an encrypted copy of all of my passwords and logins on my thumb drive (or camera card, or whatever else you can store things on… like a server somewhere if you wanted) and take it with me. So now, I’m running Password Gorilla on all of my computers and keep a copy on my thumb drive for portability and backup.

Another very cool thing is that it will merge databases. So let’s say that I’ve been running a copy on my desktop and a copy on my laptop… most of the entries are the same, but each list has a few entries that the other doesn’t… you just use the merge function and create one list containing all of the unique entries, duplicates are eliminated and you’ve synced up your two databases to be the same… very cool.

I couldn’t begin to get into the encryption scheme with you (there’s lots of information on the Password Safe site)… but let’s just say that it hasn’t been broken yet. As long as your master key (password) is never written down or stored anywhere, you should be safe as long as you follow general precautions… key loggers come to mind first… but at home… you should be safe.

Questions, shoot me a comment after registering.

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