Combining a login with answers to security questions

elkue

I have a lot of banking websites that love to ask me one of several security questions every time I login. I have figured out how to create entries in 1password to autofill these, but consequently I have many entries for the same financial institution, one for each security question. Is there an easy way to merge these all together with my main entry for that website?

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1Password Version: 6.5.5
Extension Version: 4.6.3.90
OS Version: 10.12.3
Sync Type: iCloud

matthew_ag

Hey @elkue,

Thanks for writing in, it sounds like you have many Login items - one for each of your different security items. It's a method I haven't heard of myself and it's a very clever approach :chuffed:

There is another approach which will allow you to merge you items but does have drawbacks. It involved creating custom fields in a single Login item - this is what is looks like when I'm logging into Apple and am sometimes asked for my Security Answers (see screenshot below):

Of course, it isn't possible to get 1Password to fill these in - you must open 1Password Mini and copy the relevant answer from the Login item's hovercard.

To create this, edit your existing Login item in the main 1Password for Mac app and add a new Section called "Security Questions" or similar. Then add as many custom fields to this with answers for each of your security questions. To ensure the answers aren't visible on the screen when you're copying from the hovercard, you can click on the three-dot dropdown to choose a different type for these custom fields. Choosing "Password" will ensure the value will remain hidden on screen (it's replaced with password dots).

I think there is a choice to be made between time saved by having many Login items that can fill in your security answers or having a single, neat Login item from which you need to manually copy the answers from.

I hope this helps - if you've any further questions or something doesn't makes sense don't hesitate to let me know.

Maybe someone else will have a better approach than this, it would be interesting to hear how use 1Password to store their security questions.

Best regards,
Matthew

elkue

Thanks for your detailed reply.

I think there is a choice to be made between time saved by having many Login items that can fill in your security answers or having a single, neat Login item from which you need to manually copy the answers from.

I think this gets at the issue I'm encountering. Isn't there a way that 1password could recognize which step I am on, or identify the field (aka security question) that is being asked, and use the correct answer? That way, no copy and pasting, and I can just use the keyboard shortcut all the way through until I am logged in.

matthew_ag

Hey @elkue,

At the moment 1Password can fill many different fields across multiple web pages from a single Login as long as each field is tied to the same value. When creating a Login using Autosave or the Save new Login feature 1Password creates Login items that have each value to be filled associated with field identifiers that are hidden within the web page code itself, e.g. HTML id or HTML name attribute on the <input> element. Identifiers like this are used by 1Password to intelligently match the value to the field where it's supposed to be filled.

So because this is based on the web page code, it really depends on how web site developers have built their websites. So what you want would work if the website developers specifically chose unique HTML identifiers for each security question and those identifiers were always the same for each unique security question. If this was the case, then 1Password could automatically identify which security question was required and fill in the right data.

In my experience, the security questions on a web page change but the <input> field where the user enters their answer to the security question often has the same HTML id or name no matter which question is asked so when 1Password can't determine which answer to put into the field. We could begin examining the labels beside each field to determine more context about what has been asked for each field. This could work well and we might investigate this further in the future. Right now, we want to focus on improving the reliability of the filling of usernames and passwords - improving and fixing issues with this kind of basic filling provides the most benefit to the most users. We do love hearing your feedback and it's always encouraging to hear where customers want us to focus.

Best regards,
Matthew

ref: OPX-921

elkue

I'll see if I can use those fields to make something work for me. Thanks for being so thorough, I look forward to possibly one day being able to do this with 1password. Thanks!

matthew_ag

My pleasure @elkue,

Hopefully this will get easier in the future.

Best regards,
Matthew