Control authentication with KeePass and Dropbox

Hi!

A few weeks ago it's been brought to my attention that may people have problem with dealing with password sharing and access control of may resources at the same time.
Imagine you have a team consisting of:

- system admins
- programmers
- marketers

Every position requires a different set of passwords, usually there is a lot of passwords (20+) that for security reasons should not be the same text.

I've actually came across a nice, free and fast resolution for the problem.
KeePass (and for Linux KeePassX) is a free password database that can help put in situations like that.
Your team just has to remember the password to the KeePass database. Every access type, or even person can have it's own database, but there emerges a problem of password versioning. Every change of every password would trigger and endless wave of emails to your employees about the changes. Actually there is a neat resolution for the problem as well.

DropBox is a great network service which i love to use. It makes sharing files between my computers at work and home really easy. No more sending yourself emails with files, just drop something to your dropbox folder on one end, and it automatically updates everywhere.

The idea for sharing with dropbox is that you need to create a "company dropbox" account, that everyone is connected to. Every time you or anybody else updates a file everyone that needs to know about the changes uses another password.

Lets summarize what are the benefits here:

- passwords that don't need to be remembered can be very long and complicated (KeePass has a pass generator too)

- an employee has to remember:
1) Dropbox account and password, that's two
2) Keepass db password, that's one
So only three passwords to remember, plus one per every database the employee has access to.

- passwords are automatically updated across our business

- passwords are pretty safe, keepass encrypts with a 256-bit AES or a 256-bit Twofish algorithm that are considered to be very secure by the cryptographic community

Drawbacks:
- every time someone quite their job, you need to change all their passwords + the drobbox password. Changing all passwords actually isn't that much of a problem, since dropbox + keepass resolves it.

- there is limited possibility to create passwords per employee

After this short summary IMHO this is an easy and secure way to share your passwords (or just keep your passwords at bay) without any serious knowledge about security. You may want to check out the keepass plug-in page for additional functionality http://keepass.info/plugins.html

Thanks, and see you next time,
Peter