Like many others, I'm a bit worried about the LogMeIn acquisition of LastPass. While they haven't drastically increased the pricing of LastPass (yet), it would be a good idea to look at other options.
A recommended option for open-source password management that keeps being mentioned is KeePass, a .NET application that manages encrypted passwords and secure notes. While it's mostly made for Windows, it does work, though clumsily, on Mac using Mono. Even when using the stable version of Mono, the experience is clunky: Most keyboard shortcuts don't work, double-clicking on an items crashes the software half the time, and it generally looks horrible. Still, once you learn avoid those Mono bugs, or you simply use that Windows virtual machine you have hanging around your copy of VirtualBox, KeePass is a great tool.
There is a more "native" port of KeePass called KeePassX (as in, made for X.org ). This one works much better on Macs, but has far less features than the .NET version.
As for portable versions, there are of course a dozen or so different options for Android, so I haven't explored that yet. For iOS, the best free option seems to be limited to MiniKeePass. It doesn't sync automatically to any online storage, but transferring password database files in and out is simple enough that it should be acceptable if you only sparingly create new secure items on iOS.
Speaking of syncing, KeePass is server-less, as it only deals with database files. What can be done though with the desktop KeePass is synchronize two password database files with each other easily. The databases do keep track of the history of changes for each item, so that offline file synchronization is quite safe.
Scripting options seem to be limited. I found a Perl module File::KeyPass, but it has a quite large bug that needs to be patched with a proper implementation of Salsa20.
There is also a 20-days old new KeePass-compatible app that is entirely done in pure HTML and JavaScript called KeeWeb. It can be served up as a single static HTML page on any HTTPS server, and no server side code is needed. It can also work as a standalone desktop application. It is too new for me to recommend it (a new release was done as I was typing this), but in my limited tests, it worked amazingly well. For example, I was able to load and save from OneDrive my test KeePass file using Safari on my iPhone 6. Once it matures, it may even replace MiniKeePass as my recommended iOS KeePass app.
The fact that the original KeePass code was clean and documented enough to allow for so many different implementations means that using KeePass is pretty much "future proof", unlike any online password service. Sure, browser plugin options are limited and there's no automatic synchronization, but I would fully trust it.
Published on November 9, 2015 at 20:01 EST
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