Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Recommended article on passwords

The author of this excellent article on password management uses 1Password -- as do I. He mentions some features I've yet to use ...
Remember your passwords | Business Center | Working Mac | Macworld

... I’m all in favor of regular backups, as well as MobileMe syncing, which can be configured to keep a copy of your keychains on Apple’s servers so you can sync them with your other Macs. However, even if you do either or both of these things, I recommend keeping another copy of your keychains or other password files in a secure location online.... If you do this, there’s a way to retrieve your passwords even if you’re away from home, if your computer is stolen, or if some other problem arises when you need them.

As long as you use the OS X keychain or 1Password files, your passwords are securely encrypted, so you can safely store them online without worrying that someone could get at them without your permission—as long as the password you used to secure your keychain is a good one! But there’s a catch: you can decrypt and view your passwords only on another Mac. If you think you might need to get at your passwords from a Windows PC, those files won’t do you much good.

.... Unfortunately, Keychain Access offers no option for exporting your passwords in any other format. However, 1Password lets you export your data as an encrypted Web page. ... To do this, open 1Password and choose File -> Export All -> Web Page....

1 comment:

justG said...

Thanks for the mention, John! We're working on a way to give people who also use Windows and Linux read-only access to their 1Password data. It's similar to the current web page export, but more convenient in that you'd just need to take your data file (Agile keychain) with you because the access method is built into it; you won't need to remember to export to a web page first.

We look forward to sharing more information about this with everyone soon.

--
Gita Lal
AWS Customer Care
http://agile.ws/support
http://twitter.com/1Password