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Ask HN: Does anyone use an alternative to a password manager?

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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use an alternative to a password manager?

#31

Post by codeful »

encima wrote: post #15

I use a simple 'cipher' that makes new passwords easy to remember and remains relatively secure without the need of a book/service. I have a file of the first word that comes to mind for every letter in the alphabet. Then my password is created based on some features of the site. I.e. eBay has 4 letters so I could choose: 'Elephant_4_Yankee' The delimiter is up to you and you could just as easily choose every second…

Second this. Domain should generate chiper for a password. You get unique password for every website and you dont have to remember it

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use an alternative to a password manager?

#32

Post by Outpox »

paule89 wrote: post #17

I am at the moment also trying out password managers and searching for the best one. Lastpass so far has the best features, great password generation. But on Android it lacks a good and decent integration in finding and selecting the correct password for an app. Seriously bad. 1Password is better in this regard, but you can not swipe the 1password "click here to fill out with 1password" away. So also definetly a deal…

I would suggest Bitward[0]. I used Lastpass (premium) for 3 years but when I switched from Chrome to Firefox Nightly a few months ago I learnt that Lastpass didn't have a web-extension for Firefox (it was the old extension which wasn't compatible anymore). I waited a few months hoping they would release it quickly since there's very little difference between a Chrome and Firefox extension but nope. So I canceled my plan, exported my data to Bitwarden and went with it instead. I haven't been disappointed.

[0] https://bitwarden.com/

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use an alternative to a password manager?

#33

Post by dijit »

INTPenis wrote: post #29

You're talking about mitigating the risk of break-in by using an alternative to a password manager. I'd rather propse to use a self-hosted password manager on a VPS or in a cloud service. As long as that password manager is hosted securely, VPS for example, and uses your login password to help decrypt the stored passwords. Perhaps some HMAC required too. Anyone know if this exists in the open source world?

Closest I can think of is Vault from Hashicorp[0] other than that there are options for online password managers but they all use websites and are very obtrusive. (Like Thycotic secret server[1])

[0]: https://www.vaultproject.io/

[1]: https://thycotic.com/products/secret-server/

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use an alternative to a password manager?

#35

Post by phillysnoodle »

I use a script that generates passwords based on a master password and a "site tag" (originally used for web based logins, but the site tag can be any word really, eg "somepieceofsoftwareyouuse").

You can find a web version here: https://milliways.cryptomilk.org/passhash.html You can save the page locally (it's only a piece of javascript), or extract the functionality to build your own command line tool with nodejs from it, like I did.

(not my code, and I shamelessly grabbed the pieces from the js code for my own fork of it)

This way I have a new password for every use case but only need to remember one master password, which should be pretty hard to reverse engineer. I hope.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use an alternative to a password manager?

#36

Post by TheHCA »

I wrote a simple python program a while ago where it takes my master pw, domain of the site, and an answer to a personal question to create my password for a given site using a custom cypher.

Has actually worked really well for me, though the annoying part comes when you need to login to something on your phone and the cypher program is on your desktop PC.

Though this likely wouldn't be an issue if I had an android phone and could easily make a small application for it.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use an alternative to a password manager?

#37

Post by tomelders »

I use a formula that I can figure out in my head and I just remeber that. I don’t know any of my passwords, but I can figure out my password when I need it.

It has problems on sites that have shitty password rules. But for those sites, i just mash the keyboard then rely on the forgotten password link.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use an alternative to a password manager?

#38

Post by arkh »

I use a small truecrypt file containing text files with passwords generated randomly which is available online on some of my servers. Not perfectly secure nor the best ease of use but good enough for me and not using a third party.

Note: as TC has been discontinued, using VeraCrypt would be a good idea.

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