

Ask HN: What tool do you use to keep track of all passwords? - DCTech

What tool do you guys use to keep track of all of your startup accounts and passwords?
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Rust
My brains alone. Over the years I've developed a pattern I can remember
easily, and apply another pattern to it based on the site or app's name. It's
a simple math formula that changes the entire password instead of just
applying a suffix or prefix to an existing strong password.

Ironically, the only site this fails on is my banking site which has wish-it-
was-2-factor authentication and a limit of 8 characters for the password.
Stupid.

~~~
DCTech
Right on! But what if you have a team of employees and interns that need
access to different accounts. You can't expect them all to memorize unique
passwords.

~~~
Rust
True enough. But all they'd have to memorize is one hard password (or even a
pattern like 102938), and one modifier pattern based on the URL of the site.

A simple example, using 102938 as the base password would be taking the main
name part of the url (eg. www.google.com would just be "google"), converting
each letter to a number (g = 7, o = 15, o = 15, g = 7, l = 12, e = 5), adding
them all together (61), divide that by the number of characters used (61 / 6 =
int(10.16) = 10), then add that result to every pair of numbers in the
original password (10 + 10 = 20, 29 + 10 = 39, 38 + 10 = 48), giving you a
password of 203940 for that site :)

EDIT: forgot to make this hard to crack. Again, the pattern approach can work
- 203948 for "google" could easily and predictably become
"go20og39le48@mycompany" or some such.

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craigmd
Lastpass. It's awesome. I use it for passwords, but also as a digital lockbox
for random account information where I don't want to keep the cards. A lot
better than evernote, which is where I used to keep this type of stuff.

