How to manage passwords

In recent times, an individual’s usage of multiple online platforms or services has increased exponentially. More often than not, we end up using the “Forgot Password” feature, which becomes a tedious process, especially when we have to do it over and over again. I was looking for a safe and secure way to store and manage these passwords.

Recently I came across this open source password manager ‘pass’. It is using GPG encrypted files to store passwords. And pass allows me to connect it with a git repo to keep a track of it and to save it in a central location.

pass can use your existing GPG key for encryption or it can generate one for you. If you don’t have a GPG key, follow this to create one.

• Install pass

  Use your favourite package manager to install pass,

  from MacOS brew install pass

  or from Ubuntu/Debian sudo apt-get install pass.

• Use existing GPG key with pass

  Initialise pass with your GPG key pass init "<your GPG key ID>".

• Adding your first password to pass

  Use insert command to add new password.

  pass insert email/hotmail

• Reading password from pass

  Just use pass command to get a list of your passwords.

  and use pass <path to a specific password> to see a specific password. You can also get one password into clipboard using pass -c email/hotmail

• Integrate with a git repo and track your passwords

  Create a git repo(preferably private) in one of the git repo hosting provider (GitHub/BitBucket/Gitlab), may be the one less exposed to other apps and integrations for security reasons.

  Now use pass git init to initialize git repository for pass, and add the git repo url to pass using pass git remote add origin <repo URL>. Now pass creates a git commit for each change you make to your passwords.

Next steps

pass is available in mobile devices as well. I use the community maintained Android app Android-Password-Store. You can use Paperkey to get your GPG key printed on a paper, and use it when you have lost access to your computer, to restore it to a new device.