Password Security and Distribution

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1

All,

Our company is starting to grow rather quickly and we are starting to have growing pains. We are in the need for a better mechanism for sharing passwords between our engineers. Most of these passwords are for our client's systems where some of them are controlling the password schemes (aka requiring shared user accounts). We have a process in which we change passwords every X days but, distributing these passwords to everyone who needs them is starting to become a challenge. Also, handing off passwords to someone who is stepping in to help out at 3am securely is not easy. I have tried to do google searches but I have not been able to find a good way or process to do this. I am wondering if anyone has any ideas on how to handle this?

In other companies we have used a PGP keyring to secure a text file that contained all of these passwords and then put them onto a shared customer portal. The problem with this strategy is what happens if you are not on your computer where PGP is installed?

Any suggestions will be welcomed.

Thanks in advance,

Jeremy

2

Hi,

Embarassingly late reply; I've been away.

> We are in the need for a better mechanism for sharing passwords between our
> engineers. Most of these passwords are for our client's systems where some
> of them are controlling the password schemes (aka requiring shared user
> accounts).
[...]
> In other companies we have used a PGP keyring to secure a text file that
> contained all of these passwords and then put them onto a shared customer
> portal. The problem with this strategy is what happens if you are not
> on your computer where PGP is installed?

Encrypted text files are a nice way to go until you grow to the size
when people need very different levels of access, and centrally storing
a number of these files isn't good enough.

http://devel.pluto.linux.it/projects/Gringotts/ is what we use. If an
engineer is not at a desk where they have gringotts installed, use the
-d flag to use a console/interactive version of the software instead of
the usual GTK gubbins.

-a