How to enter random characters from password?

mikes

I have several accounts where it asks me to type (say) letters 1 3 & 5 of my password.

How can I get that into 1password?

DBrown

There is no provision for that type of requirement, @mikes. There's been quite a bit of discussion about how that provides no additional security—just inconvenience.

Even if we figure out a secure way to implement it, we could consider it for inclusion in a future build of 1Password 4 for Windows, and it's been added to the lo-o-ng list of requested features. (I don't see it every being added to the current version.)

I'm sorry I don't have a more helpful answer for you at this time.

mikes

Hello & thanks for your reply.

The only possible way around this that occurs to me is to include details of such a password in Secure Notes.

Any better ideas?

Regards

DBrown

You can view your password to determine the n-th character.

365nice

I also find it disappointing that 1Password can't at least offer something to help with this...

For now I end up having a text field above my password field with the string "123456789" and then my password underneath. Then when the website asks for characters 258 - its easier to look them up without having to keep counting on my fingers... for the life of me - I don't understand why 1P can't have a "pick characters" option - where I can enter - 258, and it just shows me the characters I need. I haven't seen the discussion - but I wonder if this simple solution has been overlooked.

Tim

Thack

@DBrown: could I persuade you to reconsider this decision? 365nice offers a solution which should be easy to use and relatively straightforward to implement.

Because of the need to enter double-digit numbers, you may need to offer a two-row table where the user enters the required numbers in the top row and the relevant character appears in the row beneath.

Alternatively you could just require that the required numbers are entered with spaces: 3 12 14

Anyway, I just wanted to add my support to this suggestion, and ask you to consider moving up the priority list, because such logons these days are very common (regardless of what we think of their merit), especially on banking websites.

Steve

MikeT

Hi guys,

This is on our list to consider for 1Password in the future. We do understand that we can't convince the bank sites (or any other sites) to change their mind and tools like 1Password wouldn't exist if everybody knows the right security habits to follow.

We're not entirely yet sure how to present the UI properly without increasing its complexity but we have an awesome designer, and he'll figure something out for us.

I don't know when we might implement this but it has on our list for a while and I've added everybody's votes to our tracker on this.

Thanks for sharing your use cases, suggestions and experience with us. Keep them coming (like the two-row table one) and we'll figure out a way to approach all sorts of cases with a simple solution if possible.

In my case, I use the custom fields on the Mac to store a single character because my bank site does the same for the short pass code in addition to the username/password values:

Automating that would be nice without having to take up space in the item's details view.

PS: Custom fields are coming to 1Password 4 for Windows later this year.

Thack

Thanks for such a constructive reply, @MikeT. It sounds like our requests have been heard, and you are working on them. That's all we can ask!

Steve
(Thack)

MikeT

Hi Steve,

No, thank you for being patient with us. We wouldn't be where we are without awesome customers like you pushing us harder. :)

365nice

I'm pleased you guys are looking into this - and I will ask my banks and credit cards and countess other sites to stop doing this. It would actually be helpful to have a clear article I could reference by short URL to point them at.

The picture above is pretty good - as I said, I tend to do it horizontally with the tools we already have (and it works ok'ish) - I would worry the vertical suggestion might mean I end up having to scroll (although normally it seems like they limit it to 5-10 characters). Having something like this would be a great start to just trial such a feature (and whether its good enough).

Tim

MikeT

Hi @365nice,

That's just a quick shot of what's already possible with custom fields in 1Password. A horizontal alignment (digits below the password) is obviously preferred. We just have to figure how it would work on Windows and/or Mac given the limitations of the GUI framework we're using.