Friday, August 22, 2008

Online Passwords

In my never ending quest to find ways to secure my vast number of passwords, today I found an online password system that looks like Fort Knox: passpack.com. The system works well and is intuitive, but can we really trust anything online to stay secure. I'm still not convinced that the answer is yes, but passpack.com makes a strong case for trusting it and it looks a whole lot more secure then any other web site I've seen.

The only other caveat is that you need not only a user name and password (they call it simply 'Pass'), you also need a 'Packing Key'. The Pass and Pass Key need to be rather long for the sake of security. This makes it more secure, but also makes it more difficult to remember. If you forget your Packing Key, you are out of luck, it is unrecoverable. Because of this, it is not a good solution as a primary password protection system, it's just too risky.

My suggestion is to use it as a sort of last resort fall back option. If you travel a lot like I do, you can use it to store a couple of key passwords that will help you get back up and running should your computer (with all your passwords on it) die unexpectedly.