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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Note: The PPA will install a whole bunch of mono libraries in your system. If you are not comfortable with it, this is not for you.

Install KeePass 2 in Ubuntu

Open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:jtaylor/keepass
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install keepass2

That’s all you need to get KeePass 2 working in Ubuntu.

Importing KeePassX database to KeePass 2

If you have been using KeePassX, your password database will be in .kdb form which is incompatible with KeePass2 .kdbx. Furthermore, when you try to import in your .kdb database to KeePass 2, it will show an error stating that the importing is only supported in Windows.

A way to get around this is to first export your .kdb database to KeePassX XML file.

Next, in your KeePass2, go to FIle -> Import. Select KeePassX XML as the format and choose the XML file that you have earlier exported.

Done.

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Now, if you are like me, already have a huge database of password stored in your KeePass (or KeePassX), you won’t want to enter individually to LastPass. Similarly, if you are using LastPass and intend to switch to KeePassX (because LastPass don’t support desktop app password), you will be looking for ways to import/export your password database from one to another.

Import KeePassX password to LastPass

Note: I am using KeePassX (the Linux port of KeePass), so this tutorial will be based on KeePassX.

Open your KeePassX and log into your database. Go to “File -> Export to -> KeePassX XML File“. Save the file to your desktop or Home directory.

Open a Firefox browser and make sure you have LastPass installed. Click on the LastPass button and go to “Tools -> Import From -> KeePass -> Import”.

When prompted, select the keepass.xml file that you have just exported. LastPass will scan the XML file and ask you which passwords you want to import.

Select the password(s) you want to import and click “Import”. That’s it. Your KeePassX password is in LastPass now.

Note: I have tested it on Google Chrome and it doesn’t work. It could be due to my browser configuration or issue with the LastPass extension. I didn’t verify it. I got it working fine in Firefox.

Import LastPass password to KeePassX

The method to import LastPass password to KeePassX is not as straighforward because the LastPass export format is not supported by KeePassX. We can however use a conversion script lastpass2keepass to convert the password format.

First, in Firefox browser, click on the LastPass icon and go to “Tools -> Export to -> LastPass CSV file“. Save the file to your Home folder.

Next, download the lastpass2keepass script, extract the files and move the lastpass2keepass.py file to your Home folder. (You must make sure that the LastPass export file and the lastpass2keepass.py file are in the same folder)

Open a terminal and type:

chmod +x lastpass2keepass.py
python lastpass2keepass.py lastpassexport keepass.xml

Remember to replace the lastpassexport to the Lastpass export filename.

If everything goes smoothly, you should have a lastpassexport.export.xml file in the same folder. This will be in KeePassX format. Now open your KeePassX and import this XML file in.

Reference: LastPass forums

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When you first run LastPass, it will prompt you to create an online account. This will be the account that they use to store all your passwords. During the registration, you will have to create a strong master password. In case you are wondering how long should your password be to considered strong, there is a password meter that shows the strength as you type in your password. Note that I have used a 42-characters long password and the password meter is still not full.

If you want to let LastPass take full control over your password management, there is also an option for you to disable the default password manager in your browser.

To enable its users to migrate their existing password account to LastPass easily, there is an Import function that you can use to import your browser password setting. It also supports Keepass, 1Password, Sxipper and many other password managers.

The way LastPass works is similar to the way Firefox’s password manager works. Whenever you login to a site, an unobstructive popup will appear to ask you if you want to save the password for this site.

If the password is already in your account, when you go to the site, the login field will be prefilled with your login credential. There is even a auto-login function that you can use to quickly login to your site.

Just like Roboform, LastPass also comes with a form filling feature that you can use to quickly fill up your form. One annoying thing I found is that it shows a autofill pop up every time it detects a fillable form, including email newsletter subscription box. Since almost every sites comes with an email newsletter subscription box, the popup appears every time you visit a new site. This can be very irritating.

Bring LastPass with you everywhere

If you have installed portable Firefox on your USB drive, you can also install LastPass on the portable Firefox so that you have access to your password even when you are away from your computer. This is useful if you are on a travelling trip and need to use an Internet cafe to go online.

Backing up your password

When you save your password in LastPass, the password is stored in an encrypted form in the LastPass server. To avoid the incident where your password is inaccessible when the server is down, you can install LastPass Pocket on your computer and have it export and back up your account setting (including passwords) to your local hard drive.

LastPass currently only supports Firefox and Internet Explorer. The Safari version is on its way while the Google Chrome version is not available till Google released the extension API. LastPass works in Windows, Mac and Linux.

What other ways do you use to sync your password across various browsers and devices?

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For anyone who is lazy (just like me) or is tired of remembering hundreds of password, they only need to remember one master password to activate the password manager, which is a simple task for everyone. There are plenty of free password managers that provide great encryption and security for anyone to store their passwords.

One of my favorite password manager is KeePass (KeePassX for Linux and Mac version). It has an easy-to-use interface and uses strong 256 bits encryption algorithm (AES and TwoFish). The features of KeePassX include:

• 256 bits AES or TwoFish encryption
• Easy to use interface
• Customizable. It allows you to save many different information e.g. user names, passwords, urls, attachments and comments in one single database.
• Integrated search function allows you to search in a single group or the complete database.
• Secure password generation.
• Cross platform. This is what attracts me most. Since it can be installed in all OS, I am able to port my password database from one PC to another.

Installation

For Windows OS, download the .exe file from http://keepass.info/download.html
For Mac OSX, download the binary package from http://www.keepassx.org/downloads or .dmg file from Softpedia
For Linux, download the .deb or .rpm file from http://www.keepassx.org/downloads. Alternatively, Ubuntu users can install using Synaptic Package Manager.

Installing and using KeePassX on Ubuntu

Open up your synaptic package manager (System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager). Navigate to ‘keepassx‘ and check the box beside it. Click Apply. This will install the program and its dependency files (libqt4-core and libqt4-gui).

When installation is done, open the KeePassX (Applications -> Accessories -> KeePassX).

To save your password, you must first create a database. Click on File -> New Database. On the window that appears, set your database password. This will be your master password (and the only password that you need to remember), thus make sure you set a strong and hard to guess password.

The next step is to add a new group. This is to allow you to organize your passwords in various groups for easy navigation and retrieval. Click Edit -> New Group. Enter the title of the group and select an icon.

Now you are ready to add your password. Click Edit -> Add New Entry. On the window that appears, there are various fields that you need to fill in. Beside the password field, there is a ‘Gen‘ button. Press it if you wish to generate a random password.

On the generate random password window, you can select from a series of options to generate a strong password. Since you are not remembering the password, it doesn’t matter if it generates a 20 characters long password that is full of weird characters. What’s more important is its ability to give you a strong protection.

Once finished, click Accept to pass the newly generated password to the password entry form.

Click OK to save your password.

Done.

To add more passwords, click Edit -> New Entry.

Before you exit the program, remember to save the database (File -> Save database), else all the effort will be gone to waste.

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