best place to store passwords?

wolfman

charlieheard wrote:

It uses 448-bit Blowfish data encryption, which would take years to break.

Well years, maybe even thousands, millions, or billions. It's basically unmeasurable.

As an example an 8-bit password has 2 to the power of 8 possibilities, so 256.
A 40-bit (around 5 characters) password can be seen as quite weak. It's does have 1,099,511,627,776 possibilities, but computers these days wouldn't find that too tricky over a period of time.

A 448-bit password has 2 to the power of 448, which is:
7.2^138, so 7 followed by 138 zero's. So if 1 million has 6 zero's, that a pretty hefty number of possiblities.

Most people will be fine with a 64-128-bit password though (depending how sensative the data is, maybe try to sway towards 128). Something around 16-32 characters in length (alphanumerical and symbols).

For the odd password to forums etc... you'll be fine with much less, maybe 8 characters. Try to mix it up, something like - 5teel.Fox

Zebra

Loads of good advice there - thanks! :T

Quite a few mentions of "keypass", but the link in sra's first post is for "keepass", so was just wondering which is the correct one!

sra

Sorry

I meant keepass. (I've corrected it)

There is one called keypass but the free version is restricted and I don't know anything about it

Keepass is the one I see recommended often - some reviews

Zebra

Thanks sra!

The free version of keypass is restricted to 10 entries and Roboform, which also seems to be often recommended, is also limited.

So I think I'll give keepass a try, throw away my scraps of paper and take a leap into the 21st century!

Mercenary

I've been happily using PassWordSafe for a couple of years now, and have also downloaded TrueCrypt after Steve Gibson's recommendation (at grc.com).

My only problem with TrueCrypt is that it's written for ppl with more tech knowledge than I have, so it's a bit hard to understand all the ins-and-outs .

Will also check out other recommendations from here for comparison.

JamesM_2

So long as they're not bank passwords or anything, I write them on the plastic around my monitor screen

Zebra

I've also come across Access Manager which seems really user friendly.

Does anyone have any experience or comments?

https://www.accessmanager.co.uk

sra

Mercenary wrote:

I've been happily using PassWordSafe for a couple of years now, and have also downloaded TrueCrypt after Steve Gibson's recommendation (at grc.com).

My only problem with TrueCrypt is that it's written for ppl with more tech knowledge than I have, so it's a bit hard to understand all the ins-and-outs .

Will also check out other recommendations from here for comparison.

Truecypt isn't that hard to use. There's a tutorial here.

You do have to have a quick read of the (big) manual to know some of the pitfalls - like not defragmenting an unmounted Truecrypt partition - but you can use it by just following the defaults in the wizard.

Here's the Truecypt episode on GRC for anyone who's interested

pchelpman

Mercenary wrote:

I've been happily using PassWordSafe for a couple of years now....

Nice to see someone else using this (see my post #18)!

Toxteth_OGrady

pchelpman wrote:

Nice to see someone else using this (see my post #18)!

Me too.

:cool:

TOG