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Do you have too many accounts with different passwords or PIN codes to remember? Do you keep passwords written down? Once you might forget these passwords and than you cannot access an important forum, website or even your email account! Don’t worry, the problem is already solved!

The idea of secure passwords has appeared a bunch of years ago when the number of passwords has increased. As it is insecure to use the same password for multiple accounts, you need to either remember all your passwords or write them down anywhere. Luckily, there are some solutions that allow us to maintain security and use secure passwords at the same time. This kind of software is called password managers and we’re going to include a brief review of them.

What is a password manager? A password manager software helps a user to organize his passwords. Password manager uses a local database, where the encrypted data is stored. It may also have additional features such as automatically filling in forms or generating random secure passwords.

Password managers are available for many platforms such as for Windows, Linux, MacOS X, Pocket PC, Smart Device, Palm OS and U3. We have taken most popular 3 password managers for linux and are going to describe them below:

Password Gorilla

The Password Gorilla helps you manage your logins. It stores all your user names and passwords, along with login information and other notes, in a securely encrypted file. A single “master password” is used to protect the file. This way, you only need to remember the single master password, instead of the many logins that you use. The latest version 1.4 was released in July 3, 2006. Password Gorilla is platform-independent software, runs on most operating systems has been tested on Windows, Linux and Solaris.

Features:
- Password Safe 3 file format is supported.
- Search Password option.
- Hide main window when coming up and asking to open a file.
- Improved seed for initializing the pseudo-random number generator.
- Allow closing a locked database using the “X” button.

KeePass Password Safe

KeePass Password Safe is a tool for managing user’s passwords, released under the GNU GPL. The program stores logins, passwords and addresses of the URLs in an encrypted database. Access to the database is obtained by providing your password or a file-key. KeePass uses strong and secure encryption algorithms such as AES and Twofish, and hash SHA-256. KeePass keeps encrypted passwords in his memory even after starting and opening a database. There are Linux, Windows and Pocket PC editions of this software and it is highly recommended if you are planning to use them on multiple devices.

GPass

GPass is a password management software for GNOME desktop. GPass encrypts the file that keeps the password collection by using Blowfish security algorithm, one of the most secure on the market. The latest version of GPass is 0.5.1 and was released in March 25, 2006. Requirements are: GNOME2 libraries, OpenSSL cryptographic library.

There are some password managers that are integrated in browsers. An example could be Lastpass. It can be integrated with Firefox to store all your passwords. The only thing that doesn’t seems to be good is that your passwords are stored at a remote server and the possibility of data leek is much higher. Though I don’t think they have any reason to steal your data, it is much more pleasant to have the password database stored at a hard drive or a removable media, just like flash drive. Modern Password managers can be run from a USB Flash so that’s another good feature: your password database becomes portable and you don’t need to keep in mind all your passwords.

We recommend you to use password managers for everyday needs. Never share your password files to anyone and do not write your passwords to a text file. Let password manager do its job!