A password manager is a secure, digital vault for all your passwords, keyphrases, and online secrets. Adopting one grants you significant control over your authentication credentials and is a crucial step in fortifying your online privacy. This guide will walk you through the available solutions and the critical factors to consider when choosing a manager that confidently fits into your routine.
The Password Problem and the Solution
Passwords remain the primary method for user authentication. From a privacy standpoint, they are beneficial because, unlike biometrics, they don't disclose unique personal data beyond your username.
However, the necessity of using unique, random passwords for every single online account presents a challenge. Reusing passwords means that a single data breach can compromise all your linked accounts. Since creating and remembering complex, random passwords is difficult, we often unconsciously default to easily guessable patterns.
Password managers solve this by:
Acting as a secure repository to store unique credentials.
Generating complex, random, and unique passwords for you.
By ensuring password strength and uniqueness, managers minimize the impact of data breaches, social engineering, and brute-force attacks.
Key Features to Look for in a Password Manager
To ensure your password vault remains private and secure, scrutinize these crucial aspects:
Vault Encryption: Your password file (the vault) must be stored somewhere. Always choose a password manager that stores its vault encrypted, meaning only someone with the master password (you) can read it. Look for robust methods like AES-256 to ensure that, even if the file is compromised, the data remains unintelligible.
Vault Location (Local vs. Cloud):
Local, Encrypted Vault: Provides an additional layer of privacy as data stays on your device under your control. However, you are solely responsible for backups and syncing across multiple devices. Losing access to a compromised device means losing access to your passwords.
Cloud-Based Vault: Offers strong availability and effortless syncing across devices. Crucially, this introduces third-party trust and breach concerns. Thoroughly examine the provider’s security chain—check their security audits to ensure they don't log sensitive data like master passwords. Exercise extreme diligence before trusting a third party with your vault.
Zero-Knowledge Architecture: Prioritize managers that use a zero-knowledge or zero-access model. This guarantees that the service provider itself cannot access your stored data or master password. This offers an extra layer of protection against targeted surveillance or if the provider's servers are hacked.
Audited Security Practices: Choose a provider that undergoes regular, transparent security audits. Independent assessments provide external validation that the manager adheres to high privacy and security standards, ensuring vulnerabilities are promptly identified and addressed.
Note on Open Source: We recommend open-source apps whenever possible, as they can be independently audited. Using an independent, open-source application helps you avoid products with conflicts of interest, spyware, or data-leakage vulnerabilities.
Examples of Password Manager Solutions
Many solutions exist with varying levels of configurability and features:
Keepassis an open-source, ad-tracker-free password manager. It stores your passwords in a local, encrypted vault, and allows you to generate passwords that you can customize according to any password requirements.
It has been audited by the EU-Free and Open Source Software Auditing Community. There are several apps (or ‘ports’) you can use to interact with a Keepass vault. For instance, one option is KepassXC – a cross-platform client for desktop computers, that enables you to interact with your vault.
It provides a browser extension to automatically fill login forms, save credentials when you create an online account, and provide you with random, unique, secure suggestions for passwords. If you want to use it across all your devices you may select a server on which you can store the keepass vault and then use various apps to interact with the vault. This is more complicated. This method would help ensure you have more control and choice over where your vaults reside, rather than be forced to rely on a single provider or a cloud provider.
Apple's Passwords allows you to securely sync your passwords between your Apple devices without exposing that information to Apple. It provides a password manager called ‘Passwords’.
The password manager can automatically generate cryptographically strong password to use in Safari on MacOS and iOS. In mobile devices, you can also use this functionality in apps (and in iOS you can integrate other non-Apple password managers as well).
Most common web browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Edge) provide you with a simple, cloud-based password manager. This allows you to store and synchronize your login credentials across multiple devices that use the same browser.
However, it's important to note that these built-in password managers tend to offer fewer features compared to dedicated alternatives, such as password strength analysis, customizable options for secure password generation, and secure notes.
It's worth considering that browser-based password managers have a limitation – they are exclusively tied to the web browser itself. As such, your stored passwords are accessible while browsing the web, but cannot seamlessly be used in other applications or programs.
Conclusion: Layering Your Security
Adopting a password manager is an essential step for robust online security. However, it should be complemented with two-factor authentication (2FA) for added protection. Most dedicated password managers offer the ability to integrate 2FA authenticators (often using protocols like TOTP). Prioritizing features like strong vault encryption and audited security practices will ensure your passwords are as safe as possible.