Don’t get burned! Easy password managment
We all have to use many passwords. Unfortunately, most of time, we use only a few (if not one) password everywhere. Most of time it is really dangerous. Think of it:
I’m using an email account which belongs to my employer. If the password I use for my job is the same as my personnal gmail password. If he wants, he can try the same password to view all my personal mail or track my monster account…
This is a good reason enough to manage many different passwords. But how to do it? In general, best answers are:
- Use a program containing all password
- Write it on paper (use steganography with phone numbers for example)
- Use a checksum of the concatenation of your password and the domain name of the site you want to visit.
The first method is the best when you work only on one computer, on one place. Unfortunately, if you use many computer, it is a pain to synchronize between each of them.The second method is the basic method, not as bad as it should appear. But it is also not a really secure way to do that ; think about physical destruction by error or by accident.The third method is the one I adopted. On most computer it is easy to have a sha1 or md5 checksum at hand. You just have to do it that way :
echo -n "myUniqueStrongPassword_DomainName" | openssl sha1
or use services such as :
This process gives you a string to use as password, from which it is almost impossible to recover your password. Now you only have to remember one strong password and to calculate the checksum each time you need the password.
Many people use this method, but in my humble opinion, this is not enough shared.
