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

1 point·DCTech··4 comments

What tool do you guys use to keep track of all of your startup accounts and passwords?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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