You Need A Password Manager

You may have heard of these newfangled things called password managers. Yes the hype is real and you don’t have to put everything in a notebook, spreadsheet, or array of sticky notes – which may or may not be subject to a horrific death in the event of a natural catastrophe. There is also something to be said for using the same passwords over and over or using easy to break passwords with some variant. Is your password on this list?

But which one to choose? There are plenty out there but the two I’m going to discuss today are Bitwarden and 1Password – mostly due to the fact that they are built on open source and are zero-knowledge (the data is encrypted in transit so they can’t actually see your content). Bitwarden has a free tier versus 1Password which has a two-week trial. They are both going to have browser plugins, mobile apps and desktop applications to make filling in information super easy. If you use a spreadsheet currently, it will likely be super simple to re-format it a bit for import. Post-Its are going to take a bit more time.

You can use it on your own or upgrade to a family/team account. Bitwarden uses Collections, whereas 1Password uses Vaults. The two work pretty much the same way in that you create an object and grant certain members of the account permissions.

To break it down, here would be a good example of how a family account might be managed:

• Personal Vault – This is independent to each user and only visible by them.
• Shared Family Vault – This might have universally shared items such as wifi passwords, streaming accounts, etc.
• Shared Parents Vault – This has items that should be shared with parents and not the kiddos, such as bank logins.
• Work Vault – The various logins to your portals for work, nice and tidy and separated from your other content.

I personally like the way 1Password makes the vaults appear more independent from each other so that was the route I went and have been using it for several years at this point. Bitwarden’s collections fundamentally function the same way, they just appear as another root folder. You would delegate access using the same concepts as above.

Of course my goal here isn’t to sell you on a particular brand of password managers, what’s much more important is that you use one, period. The two I discuss are the ones that I have more experience with so I can elaborate on how they function more. Other popular password managers include: Dashlane, Lastpass, Roboform.

Words Of Wisdom

If your master password in the manager is easy to break into, you’ve not done really any good. Instead of using a password for your password manager’s master password, I recommend using a passphrase which, as you may have guessed, is a phrase rather than a word. This makes it exponentially harder to break into and will more likely be easier to remember. Hear me out – Instead of trying to remember 53!P@ssw0rd$@@ which is not very strong, try remembering Somebody once told me, the world is gonna roll me! I’m sure you heard that song in your head just now – and it’s WAY more secure and more fun to type! You can see how difficult your passwords are here, so go ahead test your current ultra-complex password against your favorite song verse or movie line.

Just remember it because zero-knowledge means they can’t get you back into your account! Be sure to write it or print it out and put it somewhere actually safe, like a safe. I know, writing passwords is a known bad idea but you should have this one accessible in case you do forget it, just be sure it is somewhere that is difficult or impossible to access by others. 1Password has a fancy Emergency Kit but simply writing it will do.

But regardless of which route you take, just take a route. In the words of Shia LaBeouf, DO IT!