Today, my title is clear, every time that someone joins the team of operations (call us devops, sysadmin, etc) we need to start sharing passwords for different services and in that point we start to listening the glove armed with razors scratching a pipe (just like Nightmare on Elm Street), and now I will scare you to death, imagine that after months giving passwords for services, one of the members of the team leave the company, OMG!! kill me now Mr. Krueger!!Well, I have some Password Managers that could give us clues and help us, but keep in mind that i am not 100% comfortable with any of them, I would like something more custom adapted to my concepts of safety, simplicity and usability.
We have three choice:
- Hosted services, and by hosted I am talking about a service that someone provides (here my spidey sense start to alert me about someone else having my passwords)
- Standalone apps, well nobody have my passwords, I could share the password db but keeping the synchronization is really sucky
- Mixed environment, now we are talking, this sounds more like a good choice.
Some of the tools available includes:
Some of them hosted like CommonKey, some standalone like KeepassX and some of them like 1password that can be setup to store the DB in Dropbox.
This is my wish list of functionalities:
- Privately hosted
- Clients for multiple platforms (mac, linux, windows, android, ios)
- Secure communication between clients and server
- Access control
- Easy synchronization
- Easy modification of information stored in the DB
- Secure storage of the information
At this point, my choice is a kind of hybrid solution manually built on top of Dropbox and using 1password as client, at the end the idea is to be able to revoke access or grant it as easy as using Dropbox. The bad part is that you need to pay for 1password and you depend on Dropbox.
As an extra point let me tell you that keeping the password in that way could give you an amazing option when someone leave the organization because you have a list of the password to change and a direct way to share the new ones.
I hope that this post give you more ideas than solutions and if you decide to solve this problem, count with me as developer and tester.
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