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Alphapass - Eamonn Fox

Alphapass iPhone App Review.

Is your email password the same with your Facebook login password and perhaps even your Twitter account? If you use the same password for your dozen or so accounts on the interweb, then you’re exposing yourself to a lot of security risks. Even more so if your password is something like "password" or "password1234" or any of the worst passwords that the year 2011 has seen. There are great ways to remember your passwords and a handful of guides to help you create a bullet-proof one for yourself without the risk of forgetting what it is (here’s one of them).

Still not satisfied with the level of “encryption” that you created for your passwords? Then you might want to try a commercial software that can take care of that for you. And Alphapass is one of them. It will run safely on iOS devices, and if you’re like me and you carry your iPhone with you everywhere, then it might come in handy.

Working with Alphapass

Alphapass, at its core, is a password manager. It will let you store passwords on your mobile device and reveal them to you when you need to login somewhere but forgot your password. Adding to that functionality is the possibility to convert any plain-text password into a scrambled string based on an alternative dictionary that you can create within the app.

The key to Alphapass is the alternative dictionary. In here, you can redefine each and every of the alphabet, both lowercase and uppercase, to be something else. The system is a simple database that stores data based on their key-value definitions. So for example, lowercase “a” can be mapped out to mean uppercase “b” and uppercase “b” to mean the pound (#) sign.

You would have to go through all the 26 letters of the English alphabet twice (once for lowercase and once for uppercase) to create a completely new dictionary. Once you do that, Alphapass will transform every password you feed it in plain-text (e.g. the word “password”) based on that dictionary by mapping each letter in your plain-text string to a completely new string and one solid-password (e.g. the word “password” becomes, based on the dictionary I created, “Fs$$u2rD”).

So I should be safe now, right?

Not quite. Alphapass can only do so much. It will encrypt your passwords based on a dictionary you created, which means that no one else has the key to reading it and hacking into your account protected by that password would require nothing less than brute force. But it’s totally up to you to remember your password or at the very least bring your iPhone with you wherever you go.

And even that feels a bit uncomfortable, because you would need to either remember the dictionary you created and do the mapping in your head, or pull out your device every time you want to log in to Twitter. I don’t know about you, but I feel uncomfortable having to rely on something else to remember all my passwords.

At the end of the day, creating a phrase and decomposing it like the video sounds like a better plan to me than to create an alternate dictionary and map every letter in the alphabet to mean something else. Either way, there’s nothing we can do that will make us 100% safe online. We can only achieve the feeling of being safe, and if relying on a 3rd party software to help you do that, then you should definitely check out Alphapass.

Screenshots

  • alphapass-iphone-app-review-passwords
  • alphapass-iphone-app-review-password
alphapass icon

Alphapass
Developer: Eamonn Fox
Category: Productivity
Version reviewed: 1.0
Price: $0.99

Our Rating

2.5 / 5

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iPhone Review Posted in App Reviews, Productivity & Utilities

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