We live in an increasingly digital world and that means that the way we work has to change. One of the reasons is that we have more and more accounts with their corresponding passwords that we must protect. Currently it is still common to see a significant percentage of users some bad practices in terms of saving passwords. Some of them are storing the key on paper or in a plain text file. Fortunately, things are changing and users are becoming more and more aware of this problem. For this reason, the use of password managers, such as the one we are going to talk about next, is increasingly common. In this article we are going to see how KeePass 2.50 greatly improves performance when working with passwords.
What KeePass offers us and how to install it
KeePass we can define it as a free password manager, allows you to protect and manage passwords safely. Some of the positives is that it is multi platform so it can be used on different operating systems like Windows, Linux, Android, and more. It should also be noted that it is Open Source and it has two ways of installation. One through the typical installer and the other with its portable / portable edition that does not require installation.
KeePass supports the advanced AES encryption standard and the Twofish algorithm to encrypt our password databases. His way of working is by encrypting the entire database, not just the password fields. In that regard, our usernames, notes, and more would also be encrypted. Other interesting options available are:
- The master password decrypts the entire database.
- It allows the export of TXT, HTML, XML and CSV files.
- Simple database transfer as it consists of a single file that can be easily transferred to another computer.
- More than 45 languages available including Spanish.
- Strong random password generator.
- Many add-ons available as they are open source, here you go examples.
You may be interested in knowing if password managers are really safe.
Installation and commissioning
We already have available KeePass 2.50 It is a stable version so it is a version that will not give us problems. Regarding the update, it is recommended to do it from version 2.x onwards. KeePass 2.50 mainly presents improvements in the integration and the user interface, and also, as we will see later, improvements when using passwords. If we want to update or download this password manager for the first time, we will click on the following link.
Above you have what this new version 2.50 looks like, in which in the next section we will see the improvements it implements when working with passwords.
What are the improvements in KeePass 2.50?
The performance of the main components with KeePass 2.50 has improved remarkably in this latest version:
- AES-KDF is now approximately twice as fast as before on Windows operating systems.
- On Linux, AES-KDF is now about four times faster than before, if we have the ‘libgcrypt’ library installed.
- On Windows, Argon2d and Argon2id are now almost twice as fast as before.
- Argon2d and Argon2id are now about three times faster than before, if we have the ‘libargon2’ library put on Linux systems.
- When running on .NET 4.7.2 or higher, GZip decompression is faster. This improves, for example, the opening of databases.
As you can see, the work with passwords has been significantly improved but there are still more news. There have also been changes to browsers, in which support has been added for detecting the latest versions of Chromium on Unix-like systems. Also, in the ‘URL (s)’ menu, there are now separate commands for Google Chrome and Chromium, if both are installed. On the other hand, improved support for detecting Vivaldi, Brave, Pale Moon and Epiphany has been added. If you want to consult the complete list of changes of KeePass 2.50 you can do it from here.
Finally, if you want an alternative, you have another free password manager that may interest you, which is Password Manager Lite for Windows.