Mastering your SAP PI/PO passwords with KeePass and SAPNW WindowRenamer

[r_herrmann]

During daily work with SAP PI systems, a lot of passwords quickly accumulate. Especially as a consultant you have more SAP PI systems at the end of the day than you can remember passwords. Nevertheless, in order to be able to use a secure and complex password for each system, the use of a password manager is indispensable. I myself, but also many customers, use KeePass as a tool of choice.

Once the passwords have been maintained, you can conveniently enter your passwords using the autotype feature. (Once you are on a website, just press: Ctrl + Alt + A and KeePass will automatically type-in your passwords).

The problem

The whole thing works wonderfully, until you come across the login page of SAP NetWeaver systems, because they do not have a clear window title that KeePass could use to assign the right password.



As you can see, the title is static and does not correspond to the specific SAP system. Thus when adding more and more SAP NetWeaver systems to your KeePass, you end up with a selection screen when using the Auto-Type feature as shown below.



The more SAP NetWeaver passwords you add the more time you will need to pickup the right entry. Since I am an IT person at heart, I do not like inefficient systems and have considered a possible solution to the problem...

The solution

So that KeePass can assign the respective SAP Logon page to a KeePass entry, the page title must contain a characteristic which is also stored in the KeePass entry. What's better here than the hostname? Nothing. Because the hostname is both known - to the browser and usually stored in the KeePass entry, too.

So to get the hostname in the page title now, I've written a little extension for the Chrome browser that essentially does the following:

• When a web page is finished loading, the plugin checks if it is an SAP NetWeaver login page.


• If it is a login page, it will pick the host name from the address bar and the host name to the page header.

Subsequently, KeePass is able to automatically match the login page with the matching KeePass entry without further configuration. (The title of your KeePass entry should contain the hostname or at least unique parts of it anywhere in between.)

How to use the extension?

There are will be two ways to use the "SAPNW WindowRenamer" Chrome extension.

1. Download it from the Chrome Web Store.


2. Download the plugin's source code from Github. You can find the Github repository over here. Then load it as "unpacked extension" as described in the first sentences of this Google developer manual.

Conclusion

Sometimes it's the little things that make life a lot easier. I hope the plugin is as useful to you as it is to me.

Since passwords as well as browser extensions are a sensitive topic, I decided to make the source code available on Github (as I did before with the RealCore SAP CPI Dashboard), so you can be sure that the plugin really only does what it claims to do.

I'm looking forward to your suggestions for improvements and your feedback. Stay productive!