Just the other day I decided to change my password for an important online account to a secure one generated by KeePass, the free, portable and cross-platform password safe. It almost ended in a very bad situation when the program (which is otherwise an excellent one) decided to crash right after I had added an entry for the account, but before I had saved the database… and just after I had logged out of the account! Argh!

My online banking site doesn’t seem to have a simple way to reset the password, which is probably a good thing in retrospect, but… it’s a weekend so calling the bank was out of the question. After a few moments of panic, however, I realized that I had used KeyPass’ automated keylist generator a few days back, which meant the password was still there. The only thing lost was the account association, and — phew! — I was able to log back in with the first unnamed password from the list.

So obviously, I’m convinced that utilizing the keylist generator serves more purposes than one. If you haven’t done so, save yourself a potential headache:

Select Tools > Generate Password List… from the main window.

Set the length and characterset for the generated passwords, and click OK.

Enter the number of passwords to generate.

To add a site, edit the next blank item from the list along with its random, pre-generated password.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 at 11:59 am and is filed under Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.