KeePass Adventures
At the behest of a friend (see his post), I decided to invest some time and energy into setting up KeePass XC. I was initially hesitant of the effort vs value, but it’s been a genuinely easy experience getting my desktop and mobile devices connected to a secure, centralized, user-owned password database.
It began with the same question I imagine everyone expects when migrating to a new password manager: am I going to have to hand copy from my current manager? I use Firefox in my day-to-day, which handily lets me export all my passwords to a CSV and them import them into KeePass. After importing each password, you can create password groups (essentially folders) to help organize them. You can even set an icon for a group, probably for at-a-glance discernment, but I just did it for fun.
After a successful import, I needed to reintegrate back into Firefox. You have to enable browser integration in the KeePass settings, the app has to be open (a setting can cause it to minimize to tray), and you need a browser extension. Once you have those three things, though, the extension will sync with KeePass and you’re set to use and add passwords with KeePass. It’s also worth noting that Firefox has built-in password storage that I disabled, as I only want to be using KeePass going forward so having Firefox also try to autofill credentials can get a bit annoying.
Now is when I dabbled into Keepass2android, one of the KeePass mobile apps for synchronizing with your remote database. It can connect through a wide variety of ways; dropbox, Google drive, a simple url, and even through a remote Samba server (which is what I already use)! I simply pointed the app to where the database lived, and it created a locally cached version of the database. There were a few settings I was prompted to change, such as enabling fingerprint authentication, setting KeePass as my default password manager, and allowing the app to synchronize with the master database. It can’t synchronize whenever I’m not on my local network, which I’m fine with, but as I mentioned before you can always host your database online and synchronize anywhere.
I had my fun, and confirmed that KeePass was a suitable replacement for Firefox and Google Passwords for both my desktop and mobile, and now I had to do the boring part: actually changing all my passwords. I went through and added a title to each credential, downloaded the favicon for each website for each entry (again, for fun), and then signed into the website to go change the credential to one generated by KeePass. This was truthfully repetitive and time consuming, but such is the price you pay. I did find that you’re able to clone an entry which will be a reference to the original; that is to say that and change to the original also updates the clone. This was primarily helpful with websites that use multiple domains, like steampowered and steamcommunity, despite using the same login.
Overall I’m happy with KeePass, and it’s been more than adequate to replace the cloud password managers provided by Firefox and Google if you’re big on owning your own data like I am.