How Do You Keep Your Passwords Safe?

How many passwords do you have to remember? How do you remember your passwords? Do you use the same password for all your accounts?

We have lots of passwords to remember: our personal emails, our Facebook accounts, twitter accounts, our work email accounts, some FTP accounts and much more.  We all know we should use different passwords for each account because if we use only one password everywhere and someone gets this password we have  a serious problem. Still we have hard times trying to remember what password we used on which website or for which account.

So we need a solution to store all our passwords safely. There is in the market many password manager solutions but I will be talking in this article about Keepass, a free open source password manager. Keepass will help you  manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file. So you only have to remember one single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish).

Since keepass is open source, you can have a look at its full source and check whether the encryption algorithms are implemented correctly.

Keepass is also cross platform with clients available for Windows, Ubuntu, Linux, MacOS X, J2ME (Cell Phones), Blackberry, Windows Mobile and more. In addition it is portable, it doesn’t require any installation.

Inside Keepass you will see a Folder structure where you can organize your logins according to type or use. In my case, I keep separate areas for Work and Personal logins. KeepPass also includes a password generation tool to help you create strong password.

It is essential to back up the password file regularly. You can use Dropbox to backup your files while you are working for free (check this article about online backups)

For more information or to download and test Keepass you can go to www.keepass.info

I started using KeePass to store my passwords and it’s really helping me. How do you manage your passwords? Do you write them on a sheet of paper or keep them in an insecure excel file or use a more secure solution?