Password Vault

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What Does Password Vault Mean?

A password vault is a software program that keeps a number of passwords in a secure digital location. By encrypting the password storage, the password vault offers users the ability to use a single master password for accessing a number of different passwords used for different websites or services.

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Techopedia Explains Password Vault

A password vault is also often called a password manager. In some cases, the software provider may add the word “manager” to the name of the password vault tool. In other cases, the terms “password vault” and “password manager” are used interchangeably. Users may prefer to use the former term because it sounds more secure, recalling a physical vault.

The idea behind the password vault is that it is not really safe to replicate passwords across different websites and to use relatively weak passwords in order to try to remember all of the different passwords that people use online. The password vault or password manager does a lot of the work for the user in that it maintains all of the different passwords in one secure space.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.