I was reading my feeds yesterday and I came across a lockergnome by Chris Pirillo. Chris was talking about someone rather careless with a cell phone conversation and it reminded me that I wanted to post a review about this software I tried. I would also suggest you go read Chris' post and take it to heart.
If you are like me, you do worry about the strength of you passwords. If you are a typical PC user however, odds are you do not even know what I mean by password strength.
The simplest way to explain password strength is, more or less, how easily one could guess you pass words. If you use your initials, odds are any two-bit hacker would guess that in about the lifespan of a quark. If you use a randomly generated set of lowercase letters, uppercase characters, numbers, and special characters that are 22 characters long, you are going to give a hacker a good run for his/her money. The obvious problem with the later is remembering the gibberish-looking password. Add to the fact that each site or account that uses a password should have its own unique password and the grey matter in our skulls will quickly be overwhelmed.
This is the beauty of KeePass. I have been using this program for about a month now. It is small, efficient and very kewl. It is open source and OSI certified. It has awesome features. It will generate and store passwords for you, encrypt you password database and is efficient enough to run off a USB drive. You can create a key disk to unlock the database, use a master password or use both a key disk and a master password. In other words, you can safely store all your passwords to a file and only have to remember to secure a disk or remember one master password.
KeePass will even store URL information, has a copy to clipboard feature for both PW and username, can be set to remind you when to change your passwords, can search its database, allows you to create folders and can auto-type. To simply put things it is easy to use and, with little effort, very powerful.
To add to the sweetness of this progie, it has optional plug ins (Lumpy likes the keeform) and is available in many languages, and, the very best part, FREE!
