I’ve been thinking about passwords recently, and am changing the way I use them.
It used to be that I used one password for everything, admittedly a horrible practice from a security standpoint. Besides being a bad practice, when I had to change my password I had to change all of my passwords. It was a days long process that I had to use a spreadsheet to organize.
As I began to move away from that way of doing tings, I let my iPad cache some passwords, Google Chrome cached many passwords, LastPass cached still others. It was confusing on a good day, ineffective and inefficient on a bad day.
Soon we’ll be using biometrics like finger prints or facial recognition to log in and passwords will be used less frequently. Until then, using a password manager is almost becoming a requirement.
Password managers such as KeePass and LastPass do an excellent job of generating and maintaining unique passwords. Modern web browsers will do this with web sites, Apple’s Keychain is built in to the OS.
The important thing today is that until biometrics become mainstream, we need a way to manage the passwords we use which should be unique to each place we log in to and should change regularly. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what kind transportation you’ve used to get to work, whether car, bus, taxi, or train, what matters is that you show up. Similarly how we maintain unique and secure passwords is not important, but with the abundance of tools available, not using one seems like a missed opportunity to have a better on line experience.