Four of the biggest obstacles to password security are:
- An easily-remembered password like 'moy1234' is also easily cracked.
- If people use cryptic passwords like 'asc#$89yu235,|jaa' then they're more likely to use the same password everywhere.
- If people do in fact use different cryptic passwords for different sites then they're more likely to write down their passwords in text files (usually unencrypted) so that they don't have to remember them all.
- Many sites expire passwords every so often. This is great in theory, but in practice it makes people more likely to use patterns in their passwords (e.g. 'moy1234-[date-of-creation]') or to write them down.
KeyMaster doesn't store passwords, it stores metadata about passwords (e.g. hostname, username or other mnemonic, etc.). Each time you use KeyMaster for, say, your bank, you give it the same (possibly insecure) proto-password---like 'moy1234'. It uses the proto-password and other metadata about that particular password to deterministically generate a cryptic password. It also stores a password iteration number, so if you need to expire a password you simply increment the iteration number and KeyMaster gives you a whole new password.
It thus solves all four problems listed above:
- You don't actually use insecure passwords for any site; you use the automatically-generated cryptic password.
- Since it uses metadata as part of the password-generation key, the same proto-password produces different passwords for different sites, so if you like you can use the same proto-password and still automatically get password-diversity.
- Since you don't need to remember multiple hard-to-remember passwords, you don't need to write them down anywhere. In fact, since KeyMaster doesn't store passwords at all (not even proto-passwords), an intruder who gets hold of your "password database" gets absolutely nothing they can use.
- The iteration number solves the password-expiration problem.
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When you run KeyMaster the first time, it doesn't have any data yet, so it asks you if it should create a new database.
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Clicking OK takes us to the main screen, which is empty since the new database is still empty. Everything's grayed out except the "New" button, which lets us create a new password object.
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Clicking the "New" button takes us to the password-creation screen. For each password we enter a mnemonic nickname, a username or other mnemonic, a hostname, an iteration number (defaults to 1), and a hint. The other three options are base 32 or 64 (32 allows only alphanumeric characters, 64 also allows special characters); whether we want special characters or not (since some sites don't allow them); and how long we want the password to be. The length is specified by giving the start and end characters, with the default length being 16.
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We fill in the data for the site we want; for example moy uses Big Money Bank.
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Pressing "OK" takes us back to the main screen. Since our database is no longer empty, the "Which password?" drop-down list is populated. We can choose "bank", enter our insecure proto-password, and click "Get". Since I'm at home and there's no one looking over my shoulder, I select the "show password" check-box so I can see what I'm typing. Deselecting "show password" would hide the proto-password.
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Clicking "Get" returns the actual password. By default, the program also copies the password to your clipboard. Closing the program clears the clipboard.
Clone this repo and run setup.py as usual:
git clone https://github.com/moygit/keymaster
cd keymaster
python setup.py install --user