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Hail Eris. Hail Jamms. Hail KLF. Hail almighty C’thulhu and Bruce Schneier’s thing about squid.

Oops. This is supposed to be a post written in homage to Password Safe (home). I’m probably the last person on earth to find out about password Safe, and that was quite some time ago.

Password Safe is an essential part of every computer user’s arsenal of utilities. Password Safe is a utility for securing all of your passwords in a database file encrypted with the Twofish algorithm. This means you can generate crazy and hard to guess passwords for every site, and have a chance of remembering them. You can store all of your different login information in one place instead of using the same password for every one and hoping no unethical site thinks to try your userid and password out on other sites. In fact, any private information you want to keep secret can be entrusted to Password Safe. The difficulty with non userid/password information is figuring out what to name it so you can find it again easily.

You can install Password Safe everywhere you go, or run it from a USB flash dive. If you run multiple instances of Password Safe with multiple databases get a Gmail, Amazon S3 or similar account and mail/transfer yourself your password safe database occasionally even if you have a USB drive. I use Password Safe to merge changes from my emailed databases to my other Password Safe-running computers.

The risk to carefully consider is that your password database is protected by a single “safe combination” (password). Don’t forget it. To practically protect your other passwords you need to remember a single strong password like, say, some hash of Sissy Spacek and/or Steve Martin’s character names in The Man With Two Brains and never forget it. If you’re writing a will, you might want to include a treasure map to the place you buried your Password Safe combination or drop a cryptic email to Dan Brown. Or you could advise your heirs to wait until cracking Twofish is trivial with contemporary computer technology.