The Acerose Password Vault provides you with
an easy way to organize and keep all your passwords both safe
and secure. In this technological age, passwords are the means
of keeping all your on-line assets safe from attack, be they
e-mail, retirement accounts, on-line banking, web site control,
or tax filings. The problem is that most people use a few
easy to remember passwords and then reuse them over and over.
With Acerose Password Vault you only need to remember one
strong password or passphrase to open the vault file. This
frees you to use strong automatically generated passwords
for all your other needs.
Some may ask, why develop another password manager
program when there are so many free programs of this type
already available? The answer becomes obvious when you consider
that such programs need to keep your password information
both safe and secure. In reviewing password manager programs
already on the market we discovered the vast majority emphasize
the secure part, but neglect the safe part. What good is a
password manager program that loses or corrupts your password
information? The Acerose Password Vault is designed to be
both safe and secure. In addition, many password manager programs
include their own handy, but flawed password generator. Acerose
Password Vault includes a built-in cryptographic quality password
generator, so you can have confidence your passwords are truly
strong.
See FAQs and more information on our support
page.
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Secure storage
of passwords: At the heart of the Acerose Password Vault
is a streaming cipher built upon the SHA-1 (Secure Hash
Algorithm 1). The SHA-1 is the basis for all federally
approved digital signature algorithms.
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Create strong passwords
easily with a cryptographic quality
password generator. The password generator is highly configurable
and graphically displays the approximate strength of the
setting you choose.
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The auto manager
feature allows many users to run the Acerose Password
Vault program from a single network location. The advantage
of using a network location is that you have access to
your passwords from any PC on the network. Hundreds of
users can create and access their passwords without needing
to know of or coordinate with other users. Of course,
you can run it on a single PC if that's what you want.
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The multiple action
launch lets you launch (open) a web page and copy the
corresponding password to the clipboard with a single
click. This feature is highly configurable and includes
the ability to use scripts as part of the URL, as well
as clear the clipboard after a selectable delay.
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You can also chain
one vault file to another, which lets you separate passwords
of one purpose from others using a master vault to open
other vaults.
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You can sort all
the passwords by any of the six columns just by clicking
on the column's heading. You can select just what columns
you want to view as well as their order and width.
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Selectable Tray
options lets you use the Acerose Password Vault program
as a tray application. You can choose to close and/or
minimize to the tray, or neither. You can also choose
to require a password to view the program's contents when
it's restored from the tray.
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You can import and
export tab or comma delimited files. If you're already
using some means of storing passwords electronically,
you may be able to export them from that software into
a tab or comma delimited file and then import them into
the Acerose Password Vault program.
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Works with Windows®
95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP. Note that Windows® Vista and Windows®
7 are not supported.
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Price: FREE
Download
Acerose Password Vault
Enter or edit data dialog
Cryptographic quality password generator
Select just the columns you want to view as well as reorder
and resize them anyway you like.
Sort by any column just by clicking on heading. Open web pages
just by selecting the item and clicking Launch; the password
can automatically be copied to the clipboard.
Download
Acerose Password Vault
What
makes Acerose Password Vault
safer than similar programs?
Sometimes simpler is also better. The vast majority
of password manager programs use some sort of database to
hold password information. The problem with databases is that,
because of their complexity, they are subject to corruption.
If you doubt this, just type "database repair" into any of
the top Internet search engines and you'll discover dozens
of business that specialize in database repair and recovery.
If the database repair utilities provided by the makers of
database engines worked well, then there would be no need
for such businesses. Do you really want to trust your password
information to a data format that's known to be susceptible
to corruption?
Acerose Password Vault uses what's known as
a flat file. Flat files are not glamorous, but because there
are no index files or internal pointers to corrupt, flat files
are reliable.
To make the Acerose Password Vault file even
safer, we use a streaming cipher to encrypt your password
data rather than the usual block cipher. With a block cipher,
the change of a single bit in the encrypted data renders the
whole record unrecoverable. With a streaming cipher, however,
the change of a single bit in the encrypted data renders just
one character unrecoverable.
To make the Acerose Password Vault file even
safer, we incorporate redundant fields for the critical user
name and password information, along with automatic error
detection and correction. Even if there's an unexpected change
of a bit in a password or user name field, that change will
be detected and automatically corrected.
To make the Acerose Password Vault file even
safer, we include an automatic backup feature that can keep
up to ten versions of your password vault file on a different
drive or even on a network. We've also included a records
recovery dialog to help you restore records you may have inadvertently
deleted.
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What
makes a password generator "Cryptographic Quality"?
Without a cryptographic quality password generator,
the passwords you generate may look strong, but are actually
very weak. It's a trap many folks have fallen into simply
because many shareware authors have little knowledge of cryptography.
Modern programming languages include random
number generators, that given an initial number (seed), will
generate a sequence of pseudo-random numbers. There are several
problems with using these built-in random number generators
for cryptographic purposes, but that's what many shareware
authors use without understanding the risks.
First, the sequence of numbers produced by commonly
used random number generators may not be as random as they
appear and may contain predictable patterns. In fact, documentation
provided with software compilers often states that the built-in
random functions should not be used for cryptographic purposes.
Second, the seed value which initializes the
pseudo-random generator is most often a 32-bit integer, and
thus, the generator is limited to that number of sequences.
Every sequence the generator can produce can be duplicated
by using the same initial seed. The maximum security of passwords
produced by such generators is thus limited by the 32-bit
seed, regardless of the length of the passwords generated.
Third, most of the popular password generators
on the market don't require you to enter a seed value, but
rather use the PC's millisecond clock to select the seed value
when you start the program, or click on something. Theoretically
this scheme randomly selects a seed number between 0 and 4,294,967,296.
However, because most users reboot their computers in the
morning, the actual range is just 1 percent of that. This
is because the PC's millisecond clock resets its tick count
to zero every time the computer is rebooted. An attacker only
needs to try a small range of the possible seed values to
reproduce the same sequence of pseudo-random numbers and then
manipulate the various settings that select the set of allowed
characters to recreate your passwords. Because the attacker
is testing entire sequences, the length of your password loses
it's power to protect your assets. It's even worse if an attacker
discovers the password generator settings you use.
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Here's the correct way ---
The password generator built into Acerose Password
Vault uses the SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) as it's pseudo-random
number generator. SHA-1 was designed by the government for
use in cryptography and it has been well researched and tested.
Rather than using a 32-bit integer as it's seed, SHA-1 uses
text as its seed. This allows Acerose's password generator
to use your vault password as part of its seed. Without knowing
your vault password, an attacker can't reproduce the sequence
of pseudo-random numbers used to generate your passwords.
And the technique of trying common words and word combinations
won't find your strong random passwords.
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