One of the most common use for Clipperz’s card index is to securely store the details of online accounts.

Clipperz is, in fact, the perfect place to save that overwhelming amount of data used to access all kind of web services: your mobile phone bills, the username you were issued by an airline’s website or the credentials for the new social network you just joined, …

Wouldn’t it be convenient if you could not only retrieve this information from Clipperz, but also directly sign-in to any of your web services without typing any username and password? This is exactly what direct logins are all about.

Feel free to forget all your passwords!

What is a direct login?

A “direct login” is just a link in your Clipperz interface that will allow you to sign-in to a password protected web site by simply clicking on it.

How do I create a “direct login” for a specific online service?

You just need to launch the Clipperz bookmarklet from the page where you usually enter the credentials to access that service. Then, if your credentials are already stored in a Clipperz card, follow these instructions, otherwise create a new card and a “direct login” at the same time using this procedure.

How do I use a “direct login”?

Nothing could be less complicated: simply click on the desired “direct login” link in the “direct login” pane that is prominently displayed on the left side of your Clipperz account. Alternatively you can launch the Compact version of Clipperz in your Firefox sidebar to keep your collection of “direct logins” always at hand.

How secure are “direct logins”?

They are as secure as the whole Clipperz application since they were designed on the same security architecture and adopting the same “zero knowledge” philosophy. This means that Clipperz cannot learn anything about your login data and your usage patterns.

How does a “direct login” work?

For those interested, here is a more technical explanation of what is going on under the hood when you create and use “direct logins”.

1. The Clipperz bookmarklet is a smart little Javascript program capable to analyze and extract the structure of a login form. When you click on it from the sign-in page of a web site, it displays a pop-up window containing the structure of the login form encoded using the popular JSON syntax.

2. When you create a “direct login”, you are simply required to copy the configuration collected by the bookmarklet to the card containing the credentials for that web site.

3. Clicking on a “direct login” link triggers several actions:

   • a new empty browser window opens;
   • a copy of the original login form is created on the new window using the data previously collected by the bookmarklet;
   • the new login form fields are filled with the corresponding values stored in the card;
   • the form is automatically submitted.

4. The above actions are mostly invisible to you. The only noticeable effect is that in few seconds you are logged in to the desired web site in a new browser window!

5. Please note: login credentials are never transmitted to Clipperz! All actions involved by creating and using “direct logins” are performed locally in your browser.

What to do when a “direct login” does not work?

Not all login forms are compatible with Clipperz “direct logins”. The Clipperz bookmarklet is capable to understand a vast majority of them, but in certain cases the direct login will fail.

There are basically two cases:

1. Flash, Java and HTTP based login forms

These kind of authentications cannot be handled by the Clipperz bookmarklet. Unless you manage to find a more friendly sign-in page to the same web site, you will not be able to create a working direct login. It can be useful to contact the website owner, present your problem and ask for alternative login forms.

2. The bookmarklet does produce a configuration, but the direct login fails.

If everything looks fine, but your new direct login is unable to automatically log you in, chances are that the problem can be solved by manually tweaking the configuration generated by the bookmarklet. Please send us an email or post a message on the Clipperz forum.