Pic Spocket

Here’s a computing trick. Today, we have to remember an impressive amount of passwords. We need passwords for everything: login in our computer, retrieve emails, connect to countless websites (forums, emails, Facebook, online stores, bill paying, etc). For better security, one should use a different password for each account. But who can remember all these passwords?!

After a while, it is easy to get confused and forget what password we used for a particular website, application or computer.

Keeping a catalog of your usernames and passwords in plain text on your computer is a very bad idea. It could easily fall in the wrong hands. A hardcopy in your home office of such a catalog is not a much better idea either.

I’ll let you in a little trick I have been using for several years.

I have been using a small utility called KeePass. This is a very small, very simple but really secure password safe utility. The best thing about it is that it is free. I am sure that there are plenty of other similar applications, but I can vouch for this one after using it for several years. I also recommended it to several friends, and they really like it too.

Here is a screen shot:

It saves your catalog in a very secure encrypted database. The password file can be opened using a simple password or you can set it up to also require a special key file. I work with the simple password protection. So you WILL need to remember at least one password: the one that opens your vault. It needs to be a good one (it protects all the other ones!). You better not forget it either otherwise you can’t open your vault!

A very good thing about the program is that you do not need to install it on a computer to run it. You can put the 2-3 files required on a USB stick for example, and your password list is always with you, with the utility to open it.

You can organize your account credentials in several categories if desired. Then you can add one entry for each one of the websites for which you have an account, and then enter the web address for the site, your username and passwords for it.

One of the great features is the search function. When you have a lot of entries in your vault, it’s very quick to locate the one you are looking for using the search field on top.

There are a lot of additional features:

• Password generator
• When double-clicking on the web address of a site in your list, it opens your browser and load the site;
• When double clicking on your username, it puts it in your clipboard for a few seconds; you can simply paste it (CTRL-V) in the field of the web page.
• Same trick with the password.
• You can also automate login scripts, but it is a little bit more advanced (I do not use this feature).

You can download the utility here:

Official Site :	http://keepass.info/index.html
Downloads :	http://keepass.info/download.html

Few tips:

• Start by trying it out with only a few passwords inside. Get familiar with the program. Once you feel good about it, and then start to populate your database with all your other account credentials.
• Keep backups of your password vault file, especially if your main file is on a USB stick! You do not want to loose all your passwords by accident.
• The password required to open your password list should be secure, and one that you can remember easily.
• For a secure password, the longer the better, mix letters (small case and upper case) with numbers and special characters (hyphen, commas, semi-colon, etc).

Give it a try, and let me know what you think. Feel free to ask me questions too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 12:10 am and is filed under Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.