Practicing Safe Passwording

February 12, 2008 by Isaac

There are many browser plugins that will manage your passwords and generate random passwords for you. These are great if you have just one computer that you use. For me, I have a Linux computer at work, a laptop for work, and a home computer. There are some sites that I want to access from all three, so I need a way to keep my passwords in sync.

Traditional password "syncing" means having an easy to remember password that is used on multiple sites. This is not ideal, but memorizing hard passwords for each site is really not practical for most humans.

A few days ago I found the answer: A piece of software called PasswordMaker. What is really cool is that there is a Firefox plugin, a Windows binary, and a web-based version. What's more, is that your data is not saved anywhere. The passwords are generated based on the host name, your user name, a master password, and several other criteria.

Because passwords are not saved anywhere this makes the online version of PasswordMaker very handy. You just enter the information you want your password generated from and then copy and paste your generated password into the login form for your site.

The Firefox plugin will save portions of this data for you, if you so choose. So, at a minimum you will just need to enter your master password and PasswordMaker will take care of the rest. As long as you remember your master password and the settings you used to generate the specific site password then you can have strong passwords on every site you visit, while only needing to remember one password. By using the online version of PasswordMaker you can still log in to your web sites from any computer, including internet cafes.

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