In this day and age of the internet, we have more content and interaction than ever before. This access generally comes with a price: everything requires a username and password. How does a mere mortal remember their credentials to login to thousands of websites? More importantly, I am not always on the same computer, how do I access my passwords from all of them?
The long term solution would be to see 100% adoption of OpenID. Inevitably many sites will always be behind the curve, so until that day comes, I recommend Revelation.
Revelation is an easy to use, secure and lightweight password manager for Linux. It is written in GTK so those running the GNOME desktop (the default for Ubuntu) will be right at home. You can have several different folders to help organize your passwords, and define actions based on the type of password being stored.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is a screenshot of Revelation in action:
What makes this great is that all of your passwords are stored encrypted. This means if someone takes your computer, without your master password your passwords would be useless. This also means we can store our password using Ubuntu One or Dropbox.
If you are curious about Dropbox I wrote a post with screenshots showing exactly how it works. Simply save your Revelation password file there, and all of your systems that have Dropbox will now have access to those passwords (once you unlock it for that session of course).
Under the preferences window in Revelation you can also adjust your default password size (when you use Revelation you simply randomly generate a new password for each website) for as long as you need, with the longer the better.
If you are running Ubuntu, you can install Revelation by clicking Applications -> Ubuntu Software Center and searching for Revelation. If you would prefer the command line version:
# sudo apt-get install revelation
There are many alternatives out there, but if you are running Linux and just need a simple, no-hassle password manager Revelation is worth five minutes to try it out.
Related posts:
- Dropbox on Ubuntu Often times you want to keep a file in sync,...
- Fedora 11 vs. Ubuntu 9.04 Put Fedora 11 on my laptop just out of boredom,...
- Connecting to Ubuntu from Windows Recently I needed to connect to a Ubuntu box from...
#1 by Fernando C. Estrada on December 31, 2009 - 5:37 pm
Quote
Revelation is great, I only wish that the Password Generator include symbols and other characters besides letters and numbers, unfortunately, the actual development of Revelation is not very active.
Best Regards and Happy New Year! =)
#2 by sharms on December 31, 2009 - 7:44 pm
Quote
I agree with you, it appears to not have much upstream activity, but maybe I will take it up and add those characters.
It would also be a little more glamorous if I made it automatically pull icons from websites instead of the generic icon.
Happy 2010 to you to!
#3 by Mike on December 31, 2009 - 8:03 pm
Quote
Download failed using apt-get and add/remove on both ubuntu 7.10 and ubuntu 8.04.
#4 by Julian Aloofi on December 31, 2009 - 9:07 pm
Quote
I’ve been using Revelation for months now as well. 100% recommendable, I generate 15 digit passwords for every website I don’t visit that often.
I’m not sure whether OpenID would really solve the problem. I currently have, let me count…, three OpenID provider. All of these required me to sign up for their services, and now I have three OpenID’s I use for different things. How have things improved? I still have to remember different passwords.
#5 by RainCT on December 31, 2009 - 9:46 pm
Quote
Nice, I can see how it can be useful, but so far I’m happy enough with Firefox remembering my website passwords and Mozilla Weave to sync them between my two laptops.
Does Revelation have some sort of integration with web browsers so that you don’t need to look them up? Also, I’m wondering what it’s relation towards Seahorse is.
#6 by Kurt von Finck on December 31, 2009 - 11:16 pm
Quote
A plain text file encrypted with my GPG key works for me. *shrug*
#7 by notimportant on December 31, 2009 - 11:31 pm
Quote
I’d love a gnome-keyring integration
#8 by Scaine on January 1, 2010 - 1:38 pm
Quote
I recommend KeepassX, simply because it’s cross-platform, which means that if I stick my password database file on a usb key, I can access it from any computer which I can install software on.
I’m required to use Windows at work, so this is a big bonus. Just don’t use KeePass 2.x series on the Windows platform – that broke the database compatibility, but the 1.x series is still being developed on Windows.
#9 by Jef Spaleta on January 1, 2010 - 4:31 pm
Quote
Sharms,
if you take over development or fork the project make sure you make a public broadcast so other disttribution packagers are aware. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done on revelation…including import/export filter bug fixes… and moving to the newer gvfs bindings from the older gnomevfs bindings. Not to mention whatever needs to be done to get it in shape for gnome 3.0.
-jef
#10 by Mahmoud on January 3, 2010 - 2:10 am
Quote
I am using KeePass 2.x with mono under Ubuntu without problems.
#11 by jeff on January 3, 2010 - 12:52 pm
Quote
I have been using revelation for >5 years now. It’s a must-have.
My only complaint is that it is abandonware (hey, latest release in 2006!). Bugs don’t get fixed.
Someone should pick up that project, but IANAD.
#12 by DaveB on January 3, 2010 - 2:25 pm
Quote
Personally I like the KDE PwManager better because it allows for notes in addition to the things that Revelation has. I like to use the notes to keep a password history for various accounts.
If Revelation adds that, it’ll be buh-bye PwManager.
#13 by Michaël on January 6, 2010 - 8:25 am
Quote
Does this integrate with the browser? For example, if I am using Firefox to check gmail.com, do I need Firefox to remember the password for me, will Firefox pull the password out of revelation, or am I supposed to go to revelation and look up the password, and then go back to Firefox and enter the password manually? I guess I am wondering whether this is just a secure vault for passwords, or whether it is more than that. Thanks!