1Password for Windows

By Neil J. Rubenking

Mat Honan's recent iCloud fiasco revealed that no matter how well you protect yourself and your data, you can still get pwned by a social engineering attack. Things could have been even worse, but Honan did use strong, unique passwords protected by a password manager, specifically 1Password for Mac. 1Password for Windows ($49.99 direct) offers the same feature set for Windows users. It's a full-featured password manager with a few quirks.

1Password's $49.99 price is a bit of an eye-opener. It's higher than any other software-only password manager that I've reviewed. In fact, some of the best ones are totally free.

Like KeePass, 1Password's basic mode of operation is local. Upon installation it creates a local encrypted database. As always, you must define a single very strong password to protect the rest of your sensitive information. As 1Password rates what you've typed, your rating moves through terrible, weak, fair, good, excellent, all the way to fantastic. I'd strongly suggest you work on creating a fantastic master password.

1Password installs support for Internet Explorer initially. In its Preferences dialog you can choose to install plugins for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.

Password Capture and Replay
Like LastPass 2.0, Dashlane 1.1, and most other password managers, 1Password automates the process of capturing login credentials. Unlike most, its capture behavior is completely different for different browsers.

If you log in to a secure site using Internet Explorer, 1Password pops up a standard dialog box that lets you edit the display name for the site and specify a folder in which to store the entry. If there's already an entry for the site, you can choose whether to replace it or add another. And you can choose to exclude the site from automatic saving just this time or always.

Under Firefox, 1Password pops up a single-line entry balloon showing the site name and username. You can click a settings button if you need to choose whether or not to replace an existing entry. There's also an option to exclude this site from automatic saving, or turn autosaving off for all sites. Note: The autosave choices aren't quite the same as in Internet Explorer.

Things are different still in Chrome. Under Chrome the plugin uses an infobar below the browser's toolbars to make the offer. You can tweak the entry name or exclude the site from autosave, but you can't assign it to a folder.

When you return to a site for which 1Password has stored credentials, it doesn't automatically fill those credentials, nor does it notify you that saved credentials are available. If you click the 1Password toolbar button, you'll see the available logins for the current site at the top of the dialog box in Internet Explorer or at the top of the menu in Firefox.

In testing I found 1Password unusually effective at capturing oddball logins. One of my test sites uses two password-style fields rather than the normal username/password pattern; 1Password caught that one just fine. It also successfully captured some, but not all, of the two-page logins I tested it with.

Navigate and Log In
As with most password managers, 1Password's browser plugin offers a menu of all your saved credentials. Selecting from the menu both navigates to the site and logs you in. Once again, the product's operation is completely different in Firefox than in Internet Explorer.

Under Internet Explorer, 1Password pops up a tabbed dialog box with a drop-down menu of available entries on the Logins tab. If you've organized your entries into folders, even folders within folders, those folders become submenus, making for a compact display.

Clicking the toolbar button in Firefox or Chrome brings up a balloon-style dialog with all logins displayed in a single scrolling list. The Firefox display doesn't use folders for organization, so you'll either scroll to the login you want or use the search option.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/BRs4AU8tt6E/0,2817,2408348,00.asp

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