Password Safe Preferences

Like many applications, Password Safe allows you to configure its behaviour and appearance to best suite your taste and needs. Many applications store such preferences in the Windows "registry", as a matter of convention and convenience. Previous versions of Password Safe used the registry as well, but this has proven to be problematic for the following reasons:

• Some of the configurable preferences are security related, and storing them in an open repository such as the Windows registry may enable an attacker to gain access to the database (for example, if the attacker were to disable the locking of the database after an inactivity timeout, the user would assume the database was safely locked while out to lunch, whereas the attacker could then access it at her convenience).
• Many people are using Password Safe from a disk-on-key or otherwise sharing the same database across several machines. It's impractical to share the configuration data in a registry in such a manner.

Password Safe has a number of preferences, each with a reasonable default value. When a user changes the configuration to a non-default value, the new value is store by Password Safe.

Password Safe defines preferences as security-related or non-security related. The former are kept in the database, encrypted with the same key as the user's data.

Non-security-related preferences are kept in a configuration file, pwsafe.cfg. This file is in XML format, with sections per host machine and per user, so that the file may be shared between different users, and across different machines.

By default, pwsafe.cfg is kept in the same directory as the pwsafe.exe executable program. If, however, the PWS_PREFSDIR environment variable is set, pwsafe will use the configuration file stored there. This is useful for cases where write permissions to the pwsafe.exe install directory is restricted (See also the description of the -g option in the Command Line Arguments Section).

The following tables describes the configuration items. Most of them are configurable via the "Manage → Options" dialog box. As we use XML to save these valies, field names are case sensitive. Preferences stored in the "pwsafe.cfg" file apply to all open databases. Those stored in the database apply only to that database. In Windows Vista or Windows 7, the pwsafe.cfg file can be found in the following directory: "C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\PasswordSafe" and in Windows XP, it can be found in: "C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\PasswordSafe". Note both directories may be hidden and Folder Vew properties may need to be modified in order to be able to view it. Obsolete preferences are not listed.

Note that only non-default preference values are stored in the configuration file or database.

Note: Do NOT modify any of the preferences in the pwsafe.cfg file manually, as this may cause unexpected or unpredictable results. Whilst we have made every effort to verify any preference we read in, we cannot guarantee that manually edited values will not cause a problem.