Master Password is one of our favorite password managers along with BitWarden. MasterPassword has a unique way of dealing with the issue of storing passwords – it doesn’t! Master Password uses cryptography to combine the data you give it to come up with a unique and instantly generated password or cryptographic phrase. Providing you give it the same information every time, you’ll get the same password every time. You can use the Password manager, online, offline, on your desktop, on your phone or even in a browser and still get the same result without ever having connected them together. The app is opensource and which allows anyone to look at the source code and check it for bugs, exploit or anything else. We have created this guide on how to use master password to help you get started with it.
To keep Master Password secure you need to have a very strong password to gain entry to the app, this should be a minimum of 8, and preferably 16 characters long using a mixture of symbols and alphanumeric characters. We explain more about password security here (Coming Soon). To make it reliable you need to give it exactly the same information each time – the username, the master password, and the way the site name is written for example wpdesigns.co.uk rather than www.wpdesigns.co.uk as these would generate two totally different passwords. It is worth making a few rules for yourself on how you enter the information so it is always the same way and simple to remember. The app can be set to remember some simple data which is unlocked when you enter your master password, this is useful to save writing in the same thing over and over.
Master Password is able to generate a huge variety of different variations of password according to your needs and that of the website you are creating the credentials for. This is useful when the website blocks the use of special characters for some reason.
How To Use Masterpassword?
Using Master Password is fairly straight forwards once you have sorted out how you would like to enter the details for each site. The longest bit about using master password is probably changing over all your other passwords to the passwords it generates – you don’t have to switch your old ones but it is highly recommended.
When signing up to a website using a strong and unique password for each site is incredibly important. If there is a data breach and details are taken from another site then hackers will enter the same password on other sites using the same credentials. If all your sites use the same password then they can gain access anywhere. A useful site to check for data breaches is – have I been pwned, this site will check your email against details of known hacks and can tell you what information was lost, when and who it was lost from.
1. If we wanted to sign up for a website, in this case, Twitter then we would have to generate a unique password for this particular site.
2. To do this we have to sign into our Master Password software using the same username and master password. If it is the first time signing in, just choose your username and create a strong master password – but one you can remember.
On the Master Password mobile app, you can sign in with your fingerprint which is a great feature.
3. By entering the name of the site in the field and combining that information with the other information provided (username and master password) the app generates a strong cryptographic password for each site entered. This password can be adjusted in the settings for each site if it needs to contain more or fewer characters, remove special characters etc. It is important to follow a template when you add your website addresses as it is simple to get confused after entering the 50th site, for example: always using the basic site URL. So in this case it would be twitter.com rather than Twitter or mobile.twitter.com. By keeping it in the same format as the others it is easy to remember. If you have a site and have multiple usernames on that site it is worth creating another memorable technique. For this, I would recommend prefixing the site address with the username. For example, if I had multiple Twitter accounts – rmitchell@twitter.com and bob@twitter.com would allow me to use multiple accounts on the same site while maintaining a simple memorable format.
4. If the site was to prohibit the use of special characters or symbols we could change the setting of the password and it would generate a new one without the prohibited characters. You can also increase the number of characters and make it a very complex password or reduce it to a simple pin number.
5. With the newly created password we can now copy and paste this into the password field. The app will save the details for next time but does not actually save the password itself. The browser will often give you an option to save the password and this is up to you.
The ability to create strong and complex passwords is something that easily outweighs the issues with setting up the password manager. In the beginning, it can be a little annoying having to change all of your passwords over to the new system but this is an important step in securing your websites and personal data. Avoiding a hack and data breach is not only important for you but if it stops the data of your customers being leaked and your reputation ruined it is even more so. Doing everything we can to stop hackers is a positive step in the right direction of website security. Download Master Password from their site.
