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White Sky released version 4.0 of their ID Vault password protection utility at the beginning of this year, but their coders didn’t stop working. On Tuesday, just a few months later, they’ve announced ID Vault 5.0 with a streamlined user interface and added protection.

“ID Vault 5.0 is designed to safeguard the entire connection from the desktop to the online account with the specific intent of protecting consumer’s online identity and online transactions,” said White Sky CEO David Watkins.
ID Vault combines password protection and management with a stripped-down ultra-secure browser to keep financial and other sensitive transactions safe. It uses a database of over 8,000 known and trusted financial sites to ensure that users can’t be diverted to a fraudulent site. This database also includes information about the exact procedure for logging into the site, so ID Vault can save your login credentials and replay them as needed. That gives it a leg up over other password managers, which often have trouble with the complex logins used by financial sites. The account information is stored in encrypted form protected by a PIN and a digital certificate locked to your computer.
I found adding a financial account in version 4.0 to be awkward. You had to select the site from a list within the program, fill in your account credentials, wait for the program to log in, and verify that it was successful. Version 5.0 streamlines the process – all you need do is launch the product’s SecureView browser and log into the site as you always would. ID Vault automatically captures and stores the login credentials.
There’s a tricky kind of hack-attack called “Man in the Middle” where a hacker gets between you and the web site you think you’re connected to. The hacker relays HTTP messages from you to the server and from the server to you, possibly recording or modifying the web traffic. An advanced version of this attack called “ssl stripping” lets the hacker extend this attack to intercept supposedly-secure HTTPS traffic by forcing the connection to remain unencrypted. (Watch for that lock icon, people!). New in version 5.0, ID Vault uses information from its database to initiate a secure connection earlier in the interaction, forestalling this attack.
White Sky offers a free Risk Calculator tool that searches your PC for unsecured personal information and offers a security score depending on how much it finds. If your risk is high, it naturally advises you to purchase ID Vault. Version 5 incorporates this tool and automatically offers to move any sensitive data it finds into ID Vault for safe storage.
ID Vault 5.0 runs under Windows XP or Windows Vista and requires Internet Explorer version 6.0 or higher; it is not compatible with Firefox. An annual subscription of $49.95 protects an unlimited number of online accounts.