Password manager

The word covers products that differ enormously once you look under it. These four questions separate them.

• The store

  One file or one table holding every pair, which is also the one thing worth stealing.

• The key

  A passphrase you type, a key held by the operating system, or a key held by the vendor.

• The road into the form

  An extension inside the page, a helper outside it, or your own two hands and the clipboard.

• The way it travels

  A vendor's cloud, a folder you own, or nothing at all, and each answer moves the risk somewhere else.

The interesting question is not whether a store is encrypted but who can open it while you sleep. If the vendor can show you your own passwords after you forget your passphrase, the vendor holds a key.

A key that ships inside a program is not a key at all, because everyone who downloads the program has it. That is why the app here carries none of its own.

A profile can carry the pair for the one account it signs into, next to that account's other settings rather than in a separate sheet. On Windows the system seals the password with a key tied to your Windows account. On macOS it is sealed with a key that ships inside the program, and on Linux it is written as typed.

Profile settings travel to the server while you are signed in, and the pair is not among them, so a teammate opening a shared profile arrives without it. Two roads take it off this machine. A transfer file (Transfer with session in the profile menu) carries it under the passphrase you set, and a plain Export asks first and leaves the pair out unless you choose to put it in.

Your password reaches the window only when you press "Show" or "Fill in the open window" in the Account sign-in window (profile menu > Sign-in details). Until then the profile list carries only a •••• mark with the hint Sign-in details, and the password never rides along with an ordinary redraw.

Your password is typed into the field as key presses, the way you would type it, and the fields are found from the app's own world that the page cannot see. Only frames on the same site are touched, and the field used is the one the form itself calls the password field.

• The browser's own saved passwords

  They live inside one browser profile and follow whoever is signed in to that browser, not the account you meant.

• A system keychain

  It seals values for programs that ask, and it has no opinion about forms, accounts or sharing.

• A team vault

  Its point is handing a secret to somebody else, which is a different problem with different failure modes.

• Autofill

  That is only the last step. Where the value was kept and who could read it is the part that matters.