I am very much not a fan of software or cloud-based password vaults. While I agree with the intention of allowing people to use long, complex, unique passwords for each site it always feels like there’s a flaw in the implementation, or in the concept itself. Locking all of your highly secure passwords up behind a single (memorable) password just seems fundamentally flawed as an idea – particularly if you’re doing so online where you have to trust other’s security. Even where it’s a local vault on your machine, a lot of convenience is lost when you move to a different machine, and having copies synced to each one using OneDrive, DropBox or similar raises the same issue as sticking the vault in the cloud.
One suggestion I’ve seen, and recommended in the past goes, against some of the fundamental advice. Certainly where the password isn’t that important, write it down and stick it in your wallet, glasses case, etc. You’ll know if it goes missing and can make sure you reset it or lock the account as soon as possible – and it means that long and complex passwords are usable.
Others include generating passwords based on an algorithm involving a core string, and something about the site or system the password is for. That way it is remembered for each site. The problem here is that such algorithms are easily figured out with just a few data points, and there are enough site compromises that those data points will be out there.
So I’m using a different solution myself. To be very clear that there is no affiliate marketing here, I get no benefit whatsoever from recommending or reviewing this option, I simply think it is one of the better options out there.
I use a hardware password vault called Mooltipass (yes, the name was part of the reason I originally looked into it, for those who get the reference) Mini which is a little USB device, and a smart card. Some software integrates smoothly into browsers for most logons, and the device itself functions largely as a USB keyboard for entering passwords. Essentially if I want to store a password I click a little icon that appears in password fields, the domain is detected and saved, and the password goes into the device. If I want to retrieve a password it’s fairly automatic with websites (software detects the domain, selects the needed account and passes it to the device, device then waits for approval before entering the password), and less clunky than an average software vault for anything else (select Login on the device, scroll to the appropriate account, click the scrollwheel and the password is entered).
Yes, it does work on phones with an appropriate cable – again fairly seamlessly. Without the smartcard you can’t retrieve the passwords, and there’s also a PIN for any manual credential management (editing passwords, adding credentials manually, etc). It’s also a rather fetching little thing. There are others out there, but this is the one I have, it works smoothly, the development team are serious about their security, and I highly recommend it to anyone who suffers from professional paranoia, or just doesn’t feel comfortable sticking the keys to their house in a key safe outside.
You can also back it up to your hard drive if absolutely necessary, or to a second device if you have one, so that dropping it down the drain does not involve losing everything. Each comes with a spare smartcard (either for a backup of the encryption key, or for a second user) which can be used as your spare, to decrypt a backup, or for a second user of the device (with a different encryption key obviously). It’s also relatively cheap at $79.
It will also work nicely with VeraCrypt for entering passphrases, so is a good way to maintain solidly encrypted partitions with different passphrases for different projects.