Password Managers Explained: How to Never Forget a Password Again

Frank Bravo 0:00
Hi, I'm Frank Bravo, and welcome to your technique over the podcast that gives you tips and tricks to help simplify and get more out of the technology in your life. Today we're talking more about passwords and password managers. In part one of my podcasts about passwords, we talked about what makes a good password. But what if you just have to many to remember. For the almost 1300 passwords I managed, there are only a few that I know by heart. I can easily recall the ones that I use all the time, like my computer password, my email password, and some websites I visit often. There are others I know because I've reused a base password and added some letters or numbers to the beginning or end, or maybe even a special character to make it more secure. But with so many passwords, how do I manage them all? Stepping back, there are several ways to do this. If you're all into the Apple products, you could use iCloud keychain to securely store your passwords across all your Apple devices. If you only use Chrome and Android phones, you could have Chrome save the passwords for you. The downside of both of these solutions is that you're limited to just website passwords, and if you use multiple types of devices or browsers, it can become unwieldy to keep everything organized because of this and multiple devices and browsers. And if you need to securely secure more information than just the username and passwords like I do. I've come to rely on password management software to keep track of the information, and this way I know they're secure. Personally, I use LastPass to manage my passwords. There are free premium family and enterprise versions, all of which offer some pretty cool features, including the ability to keep passwords with you on your mobile app and securely share them. There are plenty of other password managers available as well. All have similar features. Basically, do the same thing. There are some that are better to operate in certain operating systems than others, and some don't have desktop versions. So if you're interested in a password management software, you should do some research. Make sure it does what you wanted to do, and I'll do my best to provide some links in the notes section of this podcast for you to evaluate. So how do they work? In general, they are nothing more than fancy databases. Very secure databases. At that you create an account, you generate a master password key, which I'll talk about more in a minute. And you enter the information you want to store. If the software you picked is internet connected, it will securely sync the information so that the information is available across all your devices. Some important ideas in that last pass include securely and managing your password master key. The password manager is only as good as the security it provides, and the key that you use to unlock it. In the case of LastPass, all the passwords you enter are encrypted with your master password. The only way to decode that password from the database is with your unique key. In theory and in practice, it's the only password you'll have to remember. At least that's what they say. If you know your master password, then you can gain access to all your saved passwords. If you forget your master passwords, there are ways to set it. But it's hard to do and that's for good reason. If it's keeping all of your passwords safe, you wouldn't want to make it easy to reset it. In my case, my master password is a six word movie quote phrase that has both capital letters and punctuations and even some spaces. Even if you knew the movie, it would be really not any use to you because I remembered the quote wrong, and therefore my master password is something that is truly unique to just me. Beyond LastPass ability to store information more than just password, it can store things like credit cards and bank account numbers with secure notes. And probably the best thing about it is that it has a family plan. On this plan, you can have up to six family members. And no, they don't need to be your real family members who each have their own secure database of passwords, but also have the ability to easily and securely share passwords with each other. The enterprise version for business also has this same feature, which is pretty cool in a business setting. My family account includes my two sons and my dad. We have several passwords that are shared, so if I change the fill in the blank password, I don't have to remember to tell them the next time they log into that service. They'll be granted access with the current password. Additionally, we've given each other secure emergency access, which is another feature of the plan, though the family plan, which allows for access to the entire database of passwords in an emergency. We've set all of ours with a time delay of a few hours, which allows for cancellation if the request is going. If something weird is going on with that request, it's a great insurance policy so that if any of us needs access to all our passwords, we can have it if we ever needed it. Most password managers come with the ability to suggest good passwords, too. You can set the number of characters if the password is readable, like not including Capital O's or Zeros and Capital L's and ones so that they don't look confusing if you ever had to type them in. But of course, if you're automatically saving them into your database, you won't need to do that. So are your password secure? Let me know how you're doing. And as always, if you have an idea for a topic that you'd like me to cover, please feel free to contact me via email to Frank at your Tech makeover.com. That's it for now. Thanks for listening to your tech makeover. If you haven't already, make sure you follow the Facebook page at facebook.com. Your makeover. That's where I'll break down this and other episodes. And before you go, I wanted to remind you to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss an episode. You can also check out your Tech makeover.com, where you can see more information about each episode. If you want to find out more about me, please visit Bravo! It's until next time, I'm Frank Bravo, and this has been your tech makeover.