I have a lot of passwords. Always have, probably always will (although SuperGenPass mitigates the need for a lot of one-off passwords – I ’m looking forward to when something like it comes built-in to browsers).
There’s always been a lot of password management apps on the Mac, but my weapon of choice is PasswordWallet.
I decided on it back in the Mac OS 8 days because it also had a Palm version and synced my encrypted password file like a dream.
Numerous times I’ve been saved by having all my private passwords and info on me at all times. At ATMs and banks. At government offices. And especially at colo racks.
There seems to be even more password management apps now then there were when I selected PasswordWallet. Even though it has a funky UI, I stay with PasswordWallet for a few different reasons:
Stores passwords separately from Mac OS X’s keychain. I try not to store Very Important passwords in Mac OS X’s built-in keychain. Perhaps just paranoia on my part, but the system keychain strikes me as a well-known centralized place for extraction attacks. Keychain Access.app’s icon may as well have a big red target on it.
PasswordWallet can be configured to store your master password in the keychain, but I leave this option off.
No plugins. PasswordWallet is Just An App, and I like its code that reads+writes my passwords doesn’t wind up in other processes’ address space. Again, this is mostly paranoia.
Best-in-class Auto-typing. Since PasswordWallet is Just An App, its primary shuttle for getting its passwords out of its encrypted storage and into some godforsaken text field is auto-typing.
Auto-typing is when a program puppets (probably via
CGEventCreateKeyboardEvent()) the event posting mechanism to make other software believe the user is keying in the long password herself.Getting auto-typing right is tricky in the face of things like Secure Keyboard Entry, but PasswordWallet always operates correctly for me.
PasswordWallet’s typing abilities are more extensive than you may first realize – it was straight-forward for me to automate logging into EFTPS to pay my US941’s, supplying my segmented EIN, pin and password all in one click. Handy, and makes paying the tax man just a little less painful.
And of course there’s an iPhone version of PasswordWallet nowadays which nicely synchronizes with my desktop machine.
Long story, short: PasswordWallet has been there for me for years and shows no signs of quitting.