If you're the kind of person who is prone to losing your wallet or accidentally putting things in the washing machine, trusting your passwords to a piece of paper might be a bad idea. Managing passwords on paper is endorsed by a number of other security experts, including well-known security researcher Bruce Schneier. 'If what you're concerned about is people coming in over the internet, they can't do that if your passwords are on paper,' says Lorrie Cranor, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who says writing down passwords is a perfectly sensible security strategy. So for many users, writing passwords down on paper is a better solution. Security mistakes happen when people are using systems they don't understand

That creates an opportunity for hackers to grab their data, or, more mundanely, a risk that their hard drive will malfunction and they won't have a backup. Of course, a lot of people write their master password down somewhere on their computer. If you forget your password manager's master password, the rest of your passwords are gone forever. In contrast, everyone understands how a piece of paper works. Password managers are powerful, but their complexity can also lead to problems. Shouldn't we be using the most powerful technologies to safeguard our online lives?īut security mistakes happen when people are using systems they don't understand. To keep your passwords safe, just write them down on a piece of paper and put it in a safe place like your wallet.Ĭhoosing a low-tech solution for a high-tech problem seems counterintuitive to a lot of people. But there's another alternative that's simple, reliable, and everyone already knows how to use it: paper. If that appeals to you, it's worth giving it a try. The information is saved onto your devices and powerfully encrypted so it's almost impossible to hack. You use one master password to access them. They basically generate and remember your passwords for you. There are some major advantages to these services. So in recent weeks, a lot of computer-security experts have begun recommending password managers like Dashlane, 1Password, Lastpass, and Roboform. In other words, we're supposed to memorize a huge number of passwords designed to be impossible-to-remember. Most of us know that our passwords should be random mixtures of letters, numbers and characters, and that we shouldn't re-use the same passwords on multiple sites. News of the Heartbleed vulnerability has made a lot of people interested in better password management. There's one foolproof way to protect your information online.

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