The problem with passwords is that they can be hard to remember. Or, at least, it’s hard to keep track of which password you use with which site or service. There are a number of excellent password management applications for desktop and mobile. But you’re not always at your own computer and your mobile device might not be handy.

Why not turn to the web? There are a number of services that let you securely manage and access your passwords, no matter where you are.

Let’s take a look at Passpack, a secure and easy to use online password manager.

Setting Up Your Account

While Passpack has paid accounts, you can also sign up for a free one. The free one lasts forever but is limited to 100 passwords.

When you sign up, you’re asked to create a user name and a password. Both are a minimum of six characters and are case sensitive.

That doesn’t seem too secure, does it? Even if you enter a long password, there’s always some doubt about its security.

But when you click Sign up Now, you still have one more thing to do. And that’s create a packing key. The packing key is a sentence (one which is easy for you to remember) that encrypts and decrypts your passwords in Passpack.

When you click Done, you’re ready to go.

Adding Your Passwords

Let’s say you’ve logged into your Passpack account. After entering your user name, password, and packing key you’re taken to a page containing information about your account and news about the service. Click the Passwords tab at the top of the page.

Click the Add New button to add a password to Passpack.

All you need to enter are a name for the site or service, your user ID, and the password for that site or service. Optionally, you can add a link and the email address that you signed up with. You can also add a note about the site. That could be anything from what you use it for to challenge questions and answers that might come up when you try to log into the site.

Notice that there’s a gauge below the Password field that shows the strength of your password. A longer, more complex one will be stronger.

Once you’ve entered all the information, click OK.

Getting To Your Passwords When You Need Them

OK, you’re somewhere and need can’t remember your login information for a particular website. What do you do?

Log into Passpack and then click the Passwords tab at the top of the screen. From there, find the name of the site or service that you want to log into. Passpack lists them alphabetically, and only displays 12 per page. You can click the previous page and next page links at the bottom of each password list to move through your collection.

In the list, just click the name of the site or service for which you want to get your login information.

Notice that your password is hidden. That’s to protect you from shoulder surfing. Click show to display your password.

Pros and Cons

Passpack isn’t for everyone. You need to have an Internet connection in order to use it. And although Passpack is secure, it’s only as secure as you make it. You need to create a strong password and packing key.

On the other hand, Passpack is quite secure. You can read about how the service secures passwords here. On top of that, Passpack times out after five minutes of inactivity. You’ll have to enter your packing key to get back in.

Passpack also has a desktop application and there’s a mobile version of the site. The desktop application isn’t anything special. You’re better off going through the web interface.

If you’re not afraid to put your passwords on the web, then Passpack is a good choice. It’s secure and easy to use, and your passwords are at your fingertips no matter where you are.

Photo credit: Mihut84

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Password and bookmark managers have been around for a while and are widly used and talked about on the web. Custom homepages like iGoogle and 43marks have also been written about many many times.

Myhomepage.com is a marriage of these 3 concepts.

Once you sign up for an account you will be taken to the dashboard area. You will see these tabs: My Homepage, My Bookmarks, My Password Vault and Auto Logins.

My Homepage

The My Homepage tab will be pretty empty in the beginning. Once you start adding sites you want to auto login to, you will see things here. I have added a few sites that I would like to auto login so you can see what it looks like.

Bookmarks

Adding a bookmark is one of two ways, on the site using the search bar, or using a handy bookmarklet.

Just like using a search engine, type in the site or keyword you want to find. You will see a bunch of results. If you type in a website’s full address, you will see something like the picture below with the best result displayed a little larger.

The bookmarklet method is great for when you are surfing and you come across something you want to to revisit. To use the bookmarklet, drag the button up to your bookmark bar. It is located on the left side in the bookmark tab.

To use it, simply go to your bookmark bar and click on it when you are on a web page you want to save. A window will pop up with options for a tag, description and name of the page.

After you fill in the basic info, and save it, you can now access the site from the bookmark tab. Currently, importing bookmarks from your browser is not available, but this feature is in the works.

Auto Login

Setting a site to auto login enables you log in to any of the sites you set up. Setting up a site is a couple step process.

1. Bookmark the site described above.

2. Drag the Auto Login bookmarklet to your bookmark bar. This will be how it knows when you want to sign in.

3. In the auto login tab, there are some sites added by default. If you would like to use auto login for any of these sites, click on the little blue tab in the bottom right corner next to where it says the site name. Click the option that says Edit Auto Login.

4. Fill in your login information and click save.

Now, when you visit that site, you can just click the Auto Login bookmarklet and you are logged in.

Conclusion

In playing with these options, I found out that you need to be logged into myhompage for things to work. You don’t need to have the page open in a tab or window. The easiest way to make sure you are logged in is to set myhompage.com as your homepage. (There is a link on the top of the page.) This way, when you fire up your browser, you can make sure you are signed in. You will also have all of your bookmarked sites right at your finger tips.

Do you think the merging of two great services like this will take off?

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If you’re like me, you cheat a little. You probably use your e-mail address as a username whenever you can (or recycle the same username), re-use the same password depending on the sensitivity of whatever you’re logging into, and save certain passwords on the sites you visit frequently. Let’s not kid ourselves- we know in the back of our minds that this isn’t the best way to do it, but everybody does it anyways. But is there a better way? Can we keep our really sensitive information safe with the same kind of convenience given by saved passwords, recycled usernames, and re-used passwords?

Well in a word, “no,” but we can come close. Password management applications offer a compromise between convenience and security by storing an encrypted database of your usernames and passwords behind one master password.

Enter KeePassX, a cross-platform password manager based on the old Windows Keepass Password Safe. While not as polished as the commercial alternatives like 1Password, KeePassX is no less functional and comes without the rather hefty $39.95 price tag.

The main window of KeyPassX is simple and intuitive- 3 different panes containing the list of password groups, the list of passwords within the active group, and a sort of “card” showing the basic information for each password entry. I’m partial to the 3-column layout of Apple’s Address Book and the various Apple Mail plugins that do the same thing, but that’s a minor issue. Passwords and usernames are blocked out with asterisks, which you can view by opening the entry.

Creating a new entry brings up a window in which you enter a Title, Username, URL, password, and a comment. You can get to the highly customizable password generator from here; which allows you to select the type of characters to include, the length, and various options for character selection. As you can see from the screen shot, nobody is ever going to guess “~pE2%*dp=*K=?W7$J1,Kmo@;|“. You can set a password to expire after a certain amount of time, as well as choose an icon for each entry.

Worried about security?

KeePassX’s databases are stored locally and protected by 256-bit AES or Twofish encryption. Even 128-bit encryption like that used by 1Password would take millions of years to crack via brute-force, so you’ve really got nothing to worry about on that front.

Other nice features of KeePassX are cross-platform database formats and my personal favorite- the ability to use a key file to unlock the database. So if you wanted you could only unlock your database by inserting a USB stick containing the key file.

There are some issues I have with KeePassX.  First of all it’s still in beta (version 0.4.0 as of this writing). While I have not experienced any crashes after a couple days of use, stability is something I consider of paramount importance for a program that handles such sensitive information. While the main screen has a “New Entry” button, a “New Group” button would be nice also. Safari or FireFox integration would be nice, but since it’s open source maybe someone much smarter than I am will create a plugin.  The Settings are a little sparse- for example, it would be nice to be able to make the username visible in the Entry list. Lastly, the program could be a little more robust by offering different categories of entries such as Credit Card numbers and software license information, both of which have fields not necessarily applicable to logins and passwords.

Minor quibbles aside, KeePassX is a promising alternative to storing a text file in an encrypted disk image or shelling out $40 for commercial software. I am very impressed with the program so far, and plan to use it extensively.

Do you know of any other password managers?  Leave a note in the comments.

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