KeePass 2.13 Released, Sports Big Batch of New Features

by Lisa Hoover - Sep. 06, 2010Comments (1)

If you're not familiar with KeePass, a terrific free, open source password manager for Windows, you really ought to get to know it. In fact, it's on our own Sam Dean's list of 10 free OSS security applications that you can trust. Already a robust application for locking down all your passwords, it just got better now that the development team released KeePass 2.13 with a batch of new features and improvements.

The app's database stores all your password and registration in one place, and secures them with a single master password that accessible to no one but the user. In fact, KeePass' encryption is so strong that even if you used every computer in the world to simultaneously attack it's database, "decrypting it would take longer than the age of the universe."

The password database is stored in a single file that's easy to carry on a thumbdrive or burn to a CD, or easily export data to one of several formats including TXT, HTML, XML, and CSV. KeePass can also read data imported from other popular password managers like Password Safe v2 and Password Agent.

Some of the new features in this version include:

* Global auto-type (using a system-wide hot key) is now possible on Unix-like systems

* Added IPC functionality for Unix-like systems

* If IO credentials are stored, they are now obfuscated

* Tag lists are sorted alphabetically now

* Password quality estimation algorithm: added check for about 1500 most common passwords

If you're using a different version of KeePass, developers recommend you upgrade to version 2.13 now. The app is developed for Windows, but there are several unofficial contributed builds for Linux, Mac OS X, BlackBerry, Android, and more.