14 DAY TRIAL // Keeping your passwords secure is not a touch job anymore. There are plenty of great solutions, most of them being free of charge and offering versions for mobile devices along with synchronization service.
PasswordBox can be used without shelling out a dime, with all features active, if you don’t have more than 25 passwords to keep safe. For unlimited password storage, the developer asks $12 / 8.73 EUR per year, which is one of the lowest prices on the market.
There is also a way to get the full service for free; if you spread the word and five of your friends create PasswordBox accounts, you get a free lifetime license, a very strong incentive to adopting the service, especially since it supports the most popular platforms (Windows, Mac, iOS and Android).
Getting it on the system is dead easy because it is installs as an extension, available for the most popular web browsers on the market: Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Safari.
After installation, it’ll take its place in the web browser, at the end of the address bar in Chrome and Firefox and under it in Microsoft’s IE.
The interface is quite simple, and at the beginning you’ll have to define a master password and then a short tutorial explaining the features and settings will follow.
To make things easier to a beginner, PasswordBox comes with a set of preset websites you can log into for the first time and learn how fast the app can save the details. Basically, you log into the account and the app picks the credential details and stores them automatically.
The product seems to target beginner users because it asks if the same user name and countersign are used for other online accounts and provides a list of services to select from; a more experienced user would choose different passwords for every service they subscribe to.
The interface is simple, with easy access to areas as well as the password entries, which cannot be organized into groups as in other alternatives on the market. However, most of the users will not feel the need for this type of sorting because of the automatic grabbing and input of the credentials.
Apart from passwords, the product can also store information that is generally carried into a wallet (addresses, credit card, passport, driver’s license details or social security numbers) as well as safe notes (sensitive strings of text that need to be protected).
Keeping all this information secure is not a problem for PasswordBox. According to the developer, the app relies on client-side encryption (AES-256) and nothing leaves the user’s device unencrypted.
The master password is used for generating the encryption keys (random salt and 10,000 rounds of PKCS5_PBKDF2_HMAC_SHA2 key derivation are applied, which amounts to very strong security), so make sure you do not lose it.
Furthermore, it is not stored anywhere, locally or remotely, at any time and data is encrypted one more time via SSL.
The functionality of PasswordBox extends to securely sharing countersigns with family or trusted friends, a feature that is also available in LastPass.
It also includes a legacy function, which actually assigns heirs to your digital content in case something happens to you. The service is invitation based and the heirs have all the content transferred to their PasswordBox account, but only after the company receives and authenticates the necessary documents.
The transfer can occur because the content is encrypted locally with a second encryption key, specifically for this purpose, which is pushed to the trusted accounts.
A built-in password generator ensures that you give up the bad habit of using the same countersign for multiple accounts as the fields are automatically detected and password generation function is offered when registering.
It is a simple panel that can customize the secure strings (up to 26 characters) by mixing in letters (lower and upper case), digits, symbols. A strength meter shows the level of security of the generated line.
Auto-login is also available in the app, and it can be enabled individually, for each account.
Working with PasswordBox is extremely easy, but under advanced settings there are some interesting options that can help a less experienced user increase security. Creating a strong master password and a virtual keyboard (good against keylogging) along with enabling timed auto-lock can take the overall security level to extreme.
Implementing additional security is on the way, as options for increasing key derivation, two-factor authentication and fingerprint authentications features are on their way.
Making the switch from a different password manager should not be too complicated, although the import function did not work as expected in our case as the database we provided was partially included.
On the other hand, thanks to automatic capturing the credentials upon logging into an account, the data can be gradually added.
The Good
Secure sharing passwords with other users and the legacy function makes it easy to transfer data to trusted persons.
