Opinion - What are your thoughts on password managers? Do you use one? Would you recommend it to others?
Opinion - What are your thoughts on password managers? Do you use one? Would you recommend it to others?
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What are my thoughts on a password manager?
I think it’s both a good thing, and a crutch. I feel the fact that most services are rendered unusable without an account is sad, and with the 100’s of accounts one is expected to have a password manager is sadly needed if you can’t memorize a password or can make passwords with a consistent pass phrase.
Do I use one?
Nope, I have a password system which is good enough for most accounts that’s always more than 7 character long and unique for each account without being lost to me. The only time it has failed as when my work decided to have us change our passwords every quarter, and I ran out of password ideas.
I’m curious as to why you think using a password manager is a crutch.
This is probably an outdated view, but I remember at one poibt that a good password is to be easy to remember and hard to guess.
However with the ever prevalent password cracking passwords have been pushed further and further into obscurity. With a difficult to remember character requirements making it difficult for the average user to remember their passwords. (Worked with enough family and enough "forgotten passwords")
To prevent passwords from being forgotten most people write them down. But thats a bad idea, thus Password Managers. But they both reinforce the notion of making passwords hard for people to remember, with being more convient for the user, while at the same time potentially being worse then a sticky note. Since all passwords are in one place secured by one password (lastpass).
A website host or service provider needs to be the ones vigilent for this, not the user. The tools like salted passwords, 2fa and keeping their data and databases secured. And honestly for personal use, a note book of passwords is alot more secured since you need physical access to the book and your machine as well as knowledge that this books exists to get your passwords.
A good password you need to recall and type should be easy to remember and hard to guess indeed - diceware is a good solution for creating such passwords, given sufficient length.
But for everything else a password manager provides more benefits for the average user than drawbacks. When used properly, it creates very complex passwords that the user never has to recall - the password manager enters the password and all the user needs is a single "good" password to access all others. The drawback, as with most hosted services, is trust. Though most citizens of the modern internet have already accepted that risk multiple times over.
Also, a site administrator providing for salted, well-hashed password storage doesn't mitigate a user configuring
hunter2as their password - they're going to lose access to that account. 2FA mitigates this somewhat, but not enough to evade a well crafted phishing attempt. The onus is very much on the user to protect their account with unique, complex passwords that aren't used, in part (e.g. as a prefix) or in whole, on other websites/services.Hopefully this all becomes moot with wide adoption of Passkeys and we're indeed heading in that direction. But for now, we're stuck with passwords.
[https://xkcd.com/936/](Relevant xkcd)
Relevant xkcd : https://xkcd.com/936/