Ask Slashdot: How Do You Manage Your Passwords?

Albus Dumb Door writes "As an IT professional, I've got a problem common to many of you: dealing with a lot of passwords. Memorizing them all becomes harder with age and and an increasing number of passwords. I will forget them eventually. I am obviously unable to use something online, like Last Pass and 1Password. Using a single password for all the systems is also obviously out of the question. I know that there are a few apps for cell phones for managing passwords (like Phone Genie and mSecure), but a cell phone, unless it's kept in offline mode (and even then), is still a security risk and I'm pretty sure my employers wouldn't like me having their passwords on my cell phone. I've also taken a look at things like the YubiKey, but changing the authentication scheme of most of the systems is not an option. The only interesting option I've seen so far is the Pitbull Wallet, but they just started taking pre-orders on IndieGoGo and are not expected to deliver until August. Amazon has some hardware password managers as well, like the RecZone and Logio, but either the price or their reviews scared me away. So how do you guys prefer to manage your passwords and what do you recommend?"

Comments

SuperGenPass

[Chelloveck]

For the most part I don't save or memorize passwords. I regenerate them as needed with SuperGenPass. SuperGenPass algorithmically generates passwords by hashing the site's domain name together with a single memorized password. This always generates the same password for any given site. So, I don't have to remember them or store them anywhere, I just need to know how they're generated.

But what if I'm at someone else's computer without SGP installed? The SGP website has a "mobile" version, which is just javascript that runs entirely within the browser. Go there, type in the domain and password, and generate it. (Yes, I've checked the javascript. It's not sending your password out to the mothership or saving anything locally.)

I do keep a notebook in a plaintext file with all the sites I use. This contains the domain name that the site had when I first signed up. Domain names sometimes change, or are ambiguous (ie., the same site is available via both foobar.org and foobar.com). The text file lets me keep track of what I need in order to regenerate the password.

What about sites that require periodic password changes? I use the domain and just suffix my memorized password with a sequence number. And I write the sequence number in my notebook.

What's that? Security questions? I generate the answer by hashing the question itself rather than the domain with my memorized password. And of course, I copy the question verbatim into my text file so I can regenerate the answer when I need to.

The only failing is when I hit a site that doesn't allow certain punctuation, or has length limits, or something of that nature. Then I modify the parameters that I give to SGP and write down the specific parameters that I used.

The notebook is stored on my home fileserver in an svn repository which gets backed up every night. I'm completely screwed if I ever forget my one secret, but it's one I've been using for literally decades now. It's going to be one of the last things to go when my brain develops bit rot.