Password management apps

[frailer]

Your life now Joe?

[Joe]

It's not far from that.

[frailer]

             :cheesy:

[Stiv]

I've been using LastPass for a few years. I'm happy with it. I have it on all my laptops and my iPhone.

Be sure to access it via the extension from FF or Chrome if on unsecured WiFi. Enable the logout when signed in so you only have one active session going at a time. Form fill is helpful, as is the password generator.

[StudioMonkey]

OK so anyone with a Mac would be using Keychain BUT (and this goes for many of the others) if you forget that one password, or if anything else goes wrong, you've lost all your passwords.  That's a bad day at the office.

A better solution is to have a system of password creation that is
a) easy to remember
b) produces seemingly random passwords
and
c) is flexible enough to incorporate upper + lower case, numbers and symbols as required

I use the keyboard itself - start at a relevant letter and move key by key up / down / diagonally / sideways / clockwise / etc.  Alternate holding shift down for passwords that can have uppercase.  Use the number / symbol keys for passwords that can use those.  Keep going for as many characters as you need. 

If you must write them down (in a text file or whatever) do it in a way that isn't obvious to anyone else.  (My mother has a text file called 'Passwords' that she keeps on her desktop.  Not as secure as it might be).

Use a piece of text from a book, song lyrics, even Lorem Ipsum and set line breaks that won't reflow, then use the first letter on each line (or whatever).  You could have this stuck on your wall and no-one would guess it's your password generator.

There are any number of ways of doing this.  The point is you don't have to remember the password, just the method you use to generate it.

[Joe]

Wouldn't you run into the same type of problem? Instead of a lot of passwords to remember you would have a lot of password generating methods to remember?

[StudioMonkey]

All I can say is it works for me - you can have one method and start in different places on the keyboard so e.g. for your bank start at 'B' etc. or use different source texts if you need something that's written down.

[Farabomb]

That's really a pretty good idea.

[Joe]

Yeah doing some testing it works pretty good but I may just use it for the Master Password of one of the online services as I prefer to copy/paste the passwords. Typing secure passwords on mobile devices is tedious at best. Hell I'm not good at typing them on regular full size keyboards most of the time. :laugh:

[SpicyVindaloo]

I'll usually use a song lyric or some kind of fact to base mine on. Using the first letter of each word.

examples:
The Beatles White Album Came Out In 1968 = tbwacoi1968
Four Score And 7even Years Ago = 4sa7ya

If whatever phrase doesn't have a number in it I'll throw an old HS locker combination at the end of it or some other useless number thats been stuck in my noggin for years.

[Stiv]

You can copy/paste the PW from the LP app or view the specifics of the site - User name, PW, URL, etc., or even launch the URL from LP using its internal browser. The idea of LastPass is that you never have to enter any PW manually, other than the main PW of course. When you use the app, the PW is encrypted from the phone and cannot be hacked even by man-in-the-middle (AFAIK). If you are just looking at the PW from the app, and then entering the PW manually you are bypassing the security of the app.
There is another phone browser with LP capabilities built in called Mercury Browser. I have limited experience with it and cannot comment on its functionality.
Another great thing about LP is the Secure Check. It analyses your PW's and even keeps up-to-date on whether you should change your PW on specific sites do to hacking.

Yeah doing some testing it works pretty good but I may just use it for the Master Password of one of the online services as I prefer to copy/paste the passwords. Typing secure passwords on mobile devices is tedious at best. Hell I'm not good at typing them on regular full size keyboards most of the time. :laugh: