Someone once told me that any password you can remember off hand, is most likely a weak password. Even though this is by no means fool proof, it is often advised to use passwords made up of combinations of numbers, letters and special characters.  It is also good practice to use different passwords for different accounts i.e your email, PC, Facebook etc should all have different passwords.

Now if you are like me and always find it hard to create a strong enough password.  My situation is also made worse by the fact that I work as a System Administrator which means I get to maintain lots of  administrative passwords for many mission critical systems at work.  throw in my blog, 4 emails address. over 20 forum account, 2 Micro- blogging accounts and 5 IM accounts, and  it wont take a genius to know that I would be needing a password manager which would among other things allow me to create strong passwords, and store my passwords in a safe and encrypted format.  I did a little research and settled for KeepassX

KeePassX is an application for people with extremly high demands on secure personal data management. It has a light interface, is cross platform and published under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

source

Some of the features of KeepassX includes:

Extensive management

  • title for each entry for its better identification
  • possibility to determine different expiration dates
  • insertion of attachments
  • user-defined symbols for groups and entries
  • fast entry dublication
  • sorting entries in groups

Search function

  • search either in specific groups or in complete database
  • Autofill (experimental)

Database security

  • access to the KeePassX database is granted either with a password, a key-file (e.g. a CD or a memory-stick) or even both.

Automatic generation of secure passwords

  • extremly customizable password generator for fast and easy creation of secure passwords

Precaution features

  • quality indicator for chosen passwords- hiding all passwords behind asterisks

Encryption

  • either the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) or the Twofish algorithm are used
  • encryption of the database in 256 bit sized increments

Import and export of entries

  • import from PwManager (*.pwm) and KWallet (*.xml) files- export as textfile (*.txt)

Operating system independent

  • KeePassX is cross platform, so are the databases, as well

Free and open source software

  • KeePassX is free software, published under the terms of the General Public License, so you are not only free to use it free of charge, but also to redistribute it, to examine and/or modify it’s source code and to publish your modifications as long as you provide the same freedoms for your modified version.

Extensive management

  • title for each entry for its better identification
  • possibility to determine different expiration dates- insertion of attachments
  • user-defined symbols for groups and entries- fast entry dublication
  • sorting entries in groupsSearch function
  • search either in specific groups or in complete databaseAutofill (experimental)

UsageI have made a screen-cast on how you can easily use Keepass X to create a password. (don’t laugh at me.. its my first screencast ever :P )  (although I blabbed about this in my screencast. You would need to create a database for the first time you try to use KeePassX. )

Basic Intro to KeepassX from Bobby Adesuyan on Vimeo.

Installation

KeepassX is Multi-platform and runs on Linux and OSX  It was forked out of a windows program called Keepass and it is 100% compatible with it.If you are on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) KeePassX is in the official repository.

Install

Older version of Ubuntu can install by adding the PPA repository to their sources.You can easily do this by going to terminal (Applications–> Accessories –> Terminal ) copy and paste the command below and enter

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 579609E58FE55DE543048AF878414460095F1873 ; echo deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/keepassx/ppa/ubuntu `lsb_release --short --codename` main | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list ; sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get install keepassx

Hope someone finds it useful  🙂