Universal Password Manager
I have been wanting a way to carry my passwords around with me. I purchased a USB card. The next step was to find a way to easily manage the passwords on the disk. After much searching, I found a java application, that has been written to work nicely with Mac OS X. It is called Universal Password Manager. It wasn’t written specifically for use on a USB flash drive, but after emailing the author, I found out that it could be easily be used that way. The application and the database it generates just has to exist on the drive. And the other requirement is that the machine you are intending to access the application has to be running java and that your java has the Java Cryptology Extension installed. The online user guide has links to java and JCE if you need them. I found that my standard Mac OS X java installation was sufficient to launch and use the application. It is packaged up as an app, so on Mac OS X all you have to do is double click to launch the application.
I wanted the passwords to portable, so I also downloaded the upm-1.5.tar.gz and put it on the usb drive as well. That way if I plug it into a windows machine, I can use the command line to launch it by typing java -jar upm.jar in the directory. I saved my upm database into a folder on the drive, so either way I launch it, I can open the database.
For those of you who would like to have an application to store passwords, but don’t want to use a flash drive, you can run it locally, or you can have your database reside on the internet. There are php scripts included that help you to set it up to sync your changes with the remote database.
While the eminent password program 1password has some fantastic features, for somebody who likes to keep things simple and inexpensive, you can’t beat Universal Password Manager. Universal Password Manager is a freeware application.