Roboform to Keepass

Important note: Chris Koester has expanded on the ideas in this post in a more complete and successful manner. I’d lost a lot of posts in an over-aggressive “housecleaning” on this domain, and finally found this. So here it is, guys: the only time in history that I “broke” some exclusive technology-related info!

Foolishly, I’d switched from Firefox’s password management to Roboform, hoping that it would encourage me to choose more secure passwords for every site I used once the responsibility of remembering them all wasn’t too overwhelming. I say “foolishly”, because for a minor thing in my life such as improving the security of my logins to a number of who-cares websites (my Photobucket account solely for copying images by URL comes to mind), 30$ is pretty steep. After doing some research, I decided that I”d like to switch to KeePass, which has many of Roboform’s features but is opensource and free. (Downside: less of a no-brainer when integrating with non-IE browsers.) I ran into a minor problem which cursory Google searching didn’t address (the reason for this post): there was no way to easily convert my 100+ passwords in Roboform into a format KeePass was happy with. Roboform basically only exports passcards in a tabled HTML document (from the toolbar: Logins→Print List→Save). My solution (if you’ve got one better and I’ve been remiss, please leave a comment!) was this:

1. download a trial of PassCrypt
2. use their built-in Roboform import utility to pull in the HTML file
3. use their more robust export capabilities to output a CSV file
4. Import the CSV in KeePass

The process isn’t ideal, and will probably give security wonks fits for the number of different programs and exports it involves, but it was easier than writing a script to convert Roboform’s HTML file to a CSV, and far easier than manually re-adding my hundreds of logins would have been.

Update: I’m having issues with the “global auto-type hotkey” for KeePass, so my endorsement of it is on hold until I can write a tutorial to explain how I got it working to my liking. Also, my import of the PassCrypt CSV is not making sense, and its columns appear corrupted. I’ll update this regarding what-done-it later.