The most secured way to protect your login informations on various websites is by using different and secure passwords for different accounts. A secure password usually consists of combination of random letters, numbers, symbols, difficult to be guessed, complex, and lengthy password. So, you use a password generator to generate passwords for your logins, and your password for website-a.com is 'OtDaSOe9P2', and website-b.net is 'rRYp9UyRcxK8'. Obviously, we are not a computer to remember such passwords, unless you got an eidetic memory. If you are looking for password manager, KeePass can securely help you to store and manage your passwords.

KeePass (KeePass Password Safe) is a free, open source, light-weight and easy-to-use password manager. One of the best thing about KeePass is it is portable, so you can bring your password anyware securely in your USB stick. In this post, I will review the latest KeePass Professional Edition 2.07 beta. The latest KeePass Professional Edition is written in .NET, so in order to run KeePass Professional Edition, the system will need to have at least Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, or Mono 2.2 for Linux/Mac OS X/BSD).

What KeePass can do for you? You can use KeePass as a basic tool to store your login informations. Your passwords will be stored in a encrypted database. This database consists of only one file, so it can be easily transferred from one computer to another. KeePass also has some advanced features to help you to store and manage your login and password informations. Some features of KeePass:

• In-memory password protection and security-enhanced edit controls, your passwords are resistant to password revealing utilities.
• Sensitive informations such as master key and entry passwords are stored encrypted in process memory.
• Multiple groups & entries including title, user name, password, URL, notes, custom string fields and file attachments.
• Copy password to clipboard, drag & drop and auto-type.
• Export and import your passwords to and from various file formats such as XML, HTML, CSV and KDB3.
• Strong random password generator included.

Personally, I love the 'Two-Channel Auto-Type Obfuscation' feature. This feature should protect your password against keylogger software and clipboard monitors. This makes standard keyloggers useless. 'Two-Channel Auto-Type Obfuscation' uses the Windows clipboard to transfer parts of the auto-typed text into the target application. Keyloggers can see the Ctrl-V presses, but do not log the actual contents pasted from the clipboard. KeePass also supports drag and drop, which enables you to drag and drop your username and password into other applications. The drag and drop feature works with most applications but unfortunately, it don't work with Opera web browser.

How to Use KeePass to Securely Store Your Password

1. Download KeePass Professional Edition and extract or install it on your system. I recommend you use the ZIP package version. Run KeePass.exe.

2. You will be presented with KeePass main window. Go to File > New (1) to create a new database file to store your password. Choose the location where you want to store this database file.

3. Next, choose the method( on how you want the database file to be protected. There are 3 options available, using a master password, key file or Windows user account. You can use any one of these methods, or combination of them. In this post, I will use the master password. Select Master password (2) and create a password (3) for your database file. You should remember and secure this password. Click OK (4) to continue.

4. You can set a name and description for your password database. You can also set the default username for new entries created in the database (5). Click OK (6) to save the configuration. You can leave other options with the default value.

5. To add a new password entry, choose the password category, for example, e-mail (7). Right click on the right panel, choose Add entry (8) to add a new entry.

6. Enter the details of your login information in the next dialog. A strong random password will automatically generated for you (9). You can press the '...' icon to view the password. If you don't like the default generated password, you can always generate a new password. Just click on the password generator icon (10) and choose open password generator. You can set the characteristic of the password that you want to generate. Press OK (11) to add the password entry to the database.

7. If you want to change the master password for your database, you can go to File > Change Master Key (12).

8. After you've made a change or add new entry to your database, go to File > Save to save the changes to your database.

KeePass is freeware and open source. KeePass is available for Windows and Mono (Linux, Mac OS X, BSD). Do you use password managers to store and manage your passwords?

[Download: KeePass]