Introduction

Password Safe is a password database utility. Like many other such products, commercial and otherwise, it stores your passwords in an encrypted file, allowing you to remember only one password (the "master password"), instead of all the username/password combinations that you use.

What makes Password Safe different? Three things:

1. Simplicity: Password Safe is designed to do one thing, and to do it well. Start the application, enter your "master password", double-click on the entry and the password is now on your clipboard, ready for pasting.
2. Security: The original version was designed by Bruce Schneier.
3. Open Source: The source code for the project is available for inspection. For more information, see https://pwsafe.org.

The current version of Password Safe currently runs on Windows 7 and later. Older versions are still available supporting Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista as well as PocketPC.

The Mac version of Password Safe runs on macOS version 10.14 Mojave and later, and runs native on Intel and Apple Silicon. (Universal binary.)

Linux packages are available for popular distributions. See README.LINUX.md for more details.

FreeBSD is also supported. See README.FREEBSD.

Downloading

The latest & greatest version of Password Safe may be downloaded from SourceForge or GitHub.

Internationalization (Non-English Support)

Thanks to the help of volunteers from all over the world, Password Safe has built-in support for the following languages:

• Arabic
• Czech
• Chinese
• Danish
• Dutch
• French
• German
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Korean
• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazilian)
• Russian
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

You can update the translations or add another language via transifex, or by dropping me a note.

Installation

For convenience, Password Safe is packaged into an executable installer program. This installs the program, sets up shortcuts and allows you to uninstall the program from the Windows Control Panel. However, if you prefer, the -bin.zip file contains all the files you need. Just extract the files (using WinZip, for example) to any directory, double-click on the Pwsafe.exe icon,and that's it. You may want to create a shortcut to your desktop and/or Start menu. Finally, a Microsoft installer (.msi) package is also available.

License

Password Safe is available under the restrictions set forth in the standard Artistic License 2.0". For more details, see the LICENSE file that comes with the package.

Password Safe 3.29 and later makes use of the pugixml project, which is available under the MIT license.

Non-Windows versions of Password Safe make use of wxWidgets, under the license terms defined in https://wxwidgets.org/about/licence, which is basically LGPL, with an exception stating that derived works in binary form may be distributed on the user’s own terms.

Helping Out

Please report bugs via the project's bug tracking form, on SourceForge at https://sourceforge.net/p/passwordsafe/bugs/ or on Github at https://github.com/pwsafe/pwsafe/issues. It's worth first the bug list, to see if the issue hasn't already been reported.

Requests for features and enhancements should be submitted to the Feature Requests page, at https://sourceforge.net/p/passwordsafe/feature-requests/

You can also post questions, suggestions, rants, raves, etc. to the Help or Open Discussion forums, at https://sourceforge.net/p/passwordsafe/discussion/

If you wish to contribute to the project by writing code and/or documentation, please drop a note to the developer's mailing list: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/passwordsafe-devel or via the web form at https://pwsafe.org/contact.php

New releases are announced on the passwordsafe-announce mailing list: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/passwordsafe-announce

Last but not least: Password Safe is and will always remain an open source project, free for use and redistribution. However, donations to the project will help me justify the time and effort I spend in maintaining and improving this utility. In addition, donations to the project help maintain SourceForge, the hosting site. If you wish to donate, please click on the Donate button at the top of https://pwsafe.org

Release Notes

For information on the latest features, bugfixes and known problems, see ReleaseNotes.md for the Windows version and ReleaseNotesWX.md for the Linux and Mac versions.

Credits

• The original version of Password Safe was designed by Bruce Schneier, written by Mark Rosen, and was freely downloadable from Conterpane Lab's website. Thanks to Mark for writing a great little application! Following Mark, it was maintained by "AYB", at Counterpane. Thanks to Counterpane for deciding to open source the project.
• Jim Russell first brought the code to SourceForge, did some major cleaning up of the code, set up a nice project and added some minor features in release 1.9.0
• Releases 2.x have been brought to you by: Andrew Mullican, Edward Quackenbush, Gregg Conklin, Graham Ullrich, and Rony Shapiro. Karel (Karlo) Van der Gucht also contributed some of the password policy code and some GUI improvements for 1.92.
• Emilijan Mirceski did the new graphics for 2.0.
• Maxim Tikhonov translated the first online help to Russian.
• Thanks to the Password Safe developer's mailing list for help in nailing down the 3.x file format.
• Many, many new features in 3.x have been implemented by DK.
• Finally, thanks to the folks at SourceForge and GitHub for hosting this project.