Password Manager

My password policy for some time has been to have unique passwords for the important sites like Paypal, and internet banking sites, and not write any of this information down.

However I can’t remember a unique strong password for every site I use, so some other sites have common passwords, these are written down in case I forget which password I use for which site.

If one of these sites are hacked and my username and password is published, then I would have to change the password on all of the sites that use this username/password combination. How would I be sure I got them all? Would I be able to change in time? Is there an important site that has accidentally got one of my favourite passwords?

Also Chrome will not show you your passwords, so there is no way of checking this. What I do like about Chrome though is that it remembers passwords across all my devices, my two development PC’s, my Windows laptop, and also my iPad and Macbook.

I have decided to give LastPass a try out. Its free until the point I would like to share the passwords on my iPad.

It imports the passwords from your browsers, turns off the remember password settings and replaces this with its own. It didn’t delete the old passwords though from the Chrome store (despite what it said), so its easy to try out and change back if you don’t like it.

I’m just working through a security report from it that identifies the sites with duplicate passwords. All the sites I used will have strong auto generated passwords (you press ALT-G) apart from the sites that I would like to remember when using other PC’s. These will still have strong passwords that I remember. The way I do this is by choosing a series of words I know and string them together, e.g. AbLogaboutCoding rather than something impossible to remember like a9g57a!94*H.

I’ve only used it for a couple of hours, but this new manager appears to just work and its easy to access just like the Chrome password system was. I’ll create another post on this blog if I find anything else worth mentioning about it.