Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Password management just got a lot easier for me...

Password management just got a lot easier for me...  I've been using 1Password for years now.  It's always worked great for me on my computer, and they've had the ability to sync to my iPad or iPhone (using their IOS app) for quite a while.  But ... on the iPad and iPhone, it's been awkward to type in the master password to open the vault.  That seemed like an unavoidable nuisance to me, as how else would you secure that all-important vault full of passwords?

Well, with my iPhone 6S+, I now have a fingerprint sensor – and 1Password's latest IOS app works with it!  This is so much easier than entering that pesky master password!  The one downside I can think of is that theoretically someone could physically force me to put my finger on the fingerprint sensor (or they could chop off my finger and do it themselves).  But if someone was willing to do that, I'm sure they'd also be willing to threaten me in such a way that I'd enter my password, too, if I didn't have the fingerprint sensor.  So I'm not sure this is any less secure than what I used to do, and it's way easier.

While I was updating the 1Password app this morning, I decided to wander through my vault of 485 (!) passwords (the vast majority of which are logins of various kinds).  I see that most of them are now obsolete – old work-related logins, web sites that I haven't used since about 1825, and other such cruft.  Seems like I ought to clean it up.  But ... that would be a lot of work, and really wouldn't change the way I use 1Password at all.  So I just left all that cruft in there :)