U3 version of Password Safe

23 Oct 2007 – Applications

I recently purchased a U3-enabled flash drive. I’ve been using Password Safe (originally from Bruce Schneier’s Counterpane Labs, now a SourceForge project) for some time now to store my passwords, and it seemed like a perfect application to have on a flash drive. I was shocked when I discovered that they wanted $9.95 for the U3 version of a free utility!

Well, the U3 Developer Kit is available for a free registration and Password Safe is Open Source, so I decided to see if I could build my own U3 version. It turned out to be easier than I thought. The standard binary distribution of Password Safe already includes all of the necessary U3 support. I just followed the U3 packaging guidelines along with some pathnames gleaned from the Password Safe source to lay out the U3 package. I then used the U3 tools to generate the manifest file and configure the various actions. I even wrote a little device install utility as an NSIS script to make sure the default data directory gets created when installing to the flash drive.

UPDATE: The end of life notice for U3 technology was issued in September 2010, and I am no longer making this available for download.