In everyday life, passwords are inescapable. We need them to access our emails and a lot of other accounts, from banking apps to our favorite entertainment sites. As we’ve come to rely on passwords, password managers have become a popular solution for storing sensitive data. Here’s how password managers work and why they are better than juggling multiple passwords at once.
Password Generators: The Main Benefit
Password managers work by generating and storing random passwords to be used with your accounts. Those passwords are protected by a master password that accesses the manager. This means you only need to memorize one password, not multiple.
Generated passwords are prepared using random number generation (RNG). RNG is widely used for security and entertainment, wherever a random output is needed. This means the password generated to access your email address won’t be the same one generated for an iGaming account. As an industry, iGaming is well-acquainted with RNG tech – if you play blackjack at Paddy Power, you will find that the virtual online blackjack games utilize RNG to shuffle and deal cards. In other games, it’s also used for dice rolls and other random outcomes in digital activities. With password managers, RNG has a more practical application that allows us to have many unique passwords. Then they are stored, so we don’t have to remember them all.
That’s the main positive of password managers – it stops people from making the common mistake of using one memorable password for many different services. Instead, the master password is the only one that users need to memorize. You should put all your effort into that master password, following the typical advice offered by Microsoft Support.
The Three Types of Password Manager
Most password managers fall into two categories, online and offline.
Online password managers are the most popular, using the web to store passwords on a secure cloud. That cloud is anchored to a data center that the company protects, making for a convenient and fast service where you can access passwords whenever you please. The company doesn’t know what your passwords are because it’s encrypted before it ever reaches them, and only your password manager has the key. This is zero-knowledge encryption, which How To Geek explains here.
Offline password managers work locally instead. This means the password vault isn’t beamed away to a data center – it’s kept on your device instead. The file is encrypted and kept separate from the manager, and only accessible using your master password, putting all the responsibility in your hands, especially if the vault only exists on one device. The best local password managers allow you to synchronize vaults across your devices, though this technically makes them online since they’re using the internet to communicate.
There’s a third type of password manager, known as stateless or hardware password management. This is a plug-in, typically a USB drive with the necessary information stored on it. This piece of hardware doesn’t store the vault – there isn’t one – but instead generates new passwords after every master log-in. It also doesn’t need synchronization since it can be plugged into any of your devices. The one downside is that if you misplace the USB, you lose access to all accounts associated with it.
All three types of password management can work wonders, so long as you know how to use them safely. Most rely on online password managers because they have ready access to the internet, but if being cut off from the internet is a concern, offline or stateless is the best.
