Mac® Security Bible

6.5. Using Third-Party Password Utilities

In addition to Password Assistant from Apple, numerous third-party utilities exist to help you generate, store, and use passwords. In this section, I describe just a representative sampling of such applications, with a longer description of one particularly powerful and useful tool called 1Password.

6.5.1. Password generators

One category of tools does nothing but create new passwords for you, much like Password Assistant does. They vary in complexity, ease of use, and number of features, but the following examples are all free, so you can download them and see if any of them are to your liking:

• Arcana: www.tekuris.com/products/arcana

• Make-a-Pass widget: http://andrew.hedges.name/widgets/

• PassForRandom: http://gnuserver.se/~netzach/netzach/software.php

• Password Generator: www.vonderborn.com/passwort_generator_software.php

• PwdGen: www.softhing.com/pwdgen.html

6.5.2. Password managers

The other major category of password utilities is password managers, sometimes referred to as password vaults or wallets. Although most of these utilities can generate new passwords, their main purpose is to provide a secure way to store, search, and use them, with a single master password protecting hundreds or thousands of other passwords.

Of course, the Keychain does all these things already, and it's included with Mac OS X, so why would you want a different application? For one thing, the Keychain Access user interface leaves something to be desired; third-party ...