iPhone Password Manager

Do you use an application to help you keep track of all web passwords and for automated sign-in? If yes, chances are you currently missing it on your iPhone. Not any more as there is some good news for all you folks, the makers of 1Password have come up with with a clever way to sync your passwords with the iPhone as they have just announced “1Password for iPhone” which uses an ingenious way to sync data to the iPhone. All the details of the latest iPhone application and a step by step guide available after the jump.

Agile Web Solutions, the makers of 1Password have announced that 1Password 2.5 sports a new icon on its toolbar “Sync to iPhone” clicking on which will export all your 1Password data to an encrypted Safari Bookmarklet, which can then be used on the iPhone (or even iPod Touch) to access all your information.

In case you are worried about data security, David Teare, co-author of 1Password points out that everything is encrypted with some seriously strong cryptography, namely 448-bit Blowfish with Cipher Block Chaning (CBC) and randomized salt.

Unfortunately, 1Password is currently only available for Mac OS X.
Here is a step by step guide on how to get it to work with your iPhone courtesy David Teare over @ Switcher’s blog:

Here the assumption is you have upgraded your 1Password installation to 1Password 2.5 so you will see the “Sync to iPhone” icon in the toolbar. Clicking Sync to iPhone will bring up a new window:

As you can see in the screenshot above that it prompts you to enter the access code, which is essentially used to encrypt all your information using 448 bit Blowfish encryption.

The encrypted 1Password data is then stored into a Safari Bookmarklet, which is a standard bookmark, but instead of containing just an address, it actually contains the entire web page. By default the bookmarklet is named 1Password and put as a root element.

The next time you export we will find the bookmarklet and update it, you can then launch iTunes to sync it your iPhone.

Once iTunes syncs to your iPhone you will see the 1Password in your iPhone’s bookmarks.

Clicking the bookmark will open a page asking for your Access Code.

Enter the same Access Code you used during the export. After you have entered the access code you will see the Standard 1Password section as seen below.

So tapping each section will show you all the entries under that section and tapping an entry will show you all the details of that entry.

Wasn’t that easy? It definitely seems like an easy way to sync your password information to the iPhone, however, 1Password for iPhone does not solve the problem completely as it currently only makes information available on the iPhone but is limited in utility as it doesn’t populate the webform with the username and password.

David clarifies that they are already working of this and are hoping to get “Go&Fill” functionality working soon so that you can automatically login to web sites using your iPhone and signs off with this quote “Rome was not built in a day; it will take some time but we have some great solutions in mind.”

As Marc Orchant @ blognation points out that this is indeed a clever way to sync data to the iPhone without the need of any iPhone hacks and we could probably see developers using bookmarklets as a way to extend what the iPhone can do especially since iPhone’s Notes application is essentially worthless until Leopard ships.

To check out 1Password for iPhone visit the 1Password 2.5 Beta forum. Don’t forget to let us know how well it worked for you.

Source: blognation