5 ms·

A Password Manager That Doesn't Store Passwords

53 points by libeclipse 10y ago

ketralnis 10y ago
> 1. Your passwords are generated on-the-fly based on a pure algorithm > 2. Nothing is stored so there’s nothing to steal [...] > 4. No need to sync data, as there’s nothing to sync! If there's only one possible password for a given website, and every password is stateless, how do you change the password if it's compromised?
- pstrateman 10y ago
  Even worse, how do you handle sites that restrict valid passwords?
  - duaneb 10y ago
    Yea, that makes this approach useless.
- stephanerangaya 10y ago
  i was thinking the same, maybe you change the keyword, but then you need to remember that you changed it.. not very convenient.
  - msl09 10y ago
    Yeah, my personal password manager is mostly that but with salt and other shenanigans, the algorithm is : bytestring = hash(master_password + url_domain + random_salt + persona) password = translate( bytestring, alphanumeric + special_symbols_required_for_the_site )[:max_allowed_length_for_website] print(password) storage[(url_domain, persona)] = ( random_salt, max_allowed_length_for_website, special_symbols_required_for_the_site ) The advantage is that it's safer than password managers that store your passwords or require you to send your password over the internet, and it's more flexible than managers that do not store any information. The problem is that you need to copy your database file to each device you use , that can be specially frustrating when I need to use android, for instance.
bascule 10y ago
Deterministic password schemes seem to pop up pretty frequently. Here's one of the most famous: https://www.pwdhash.com/ https://www.pwdhash.com/
- curryhoward 10y ago
  A few others: 1) SuperGenPass - http://www.supergenpass.com/ http://www.supergenpass.com/ 2) Vault - https://github.com/jcoglan/vault https://github.com/jcoglan/vault 3) Hashpass - https://www.stephanboyer.com/post/101/hashpass-a-stateless-password-manager-for-chrome https://www.stephanboyer.com/post/101/hashpass-a-stateless-p... (Disclaimer: I made #3) One suggestion for improvement for the OP: make this a browser extension. Probably more convenient than switching to a terminal whenever you want to log into something.
winstonewert 10y ago
This strikes me as less secure then a password manager that stores passwords. Here, if someone gets my master password all is lost. With stored passwords, they'd have to get both my master password and the encrypted passwords.
- alextgordon 10y ago
  It also lacks what you might call 'forward secrecy'. If someone gets access to my master password and an old 1password backup, then they get all the passwords in the backup. But with this, if someone gets access to my master password, they get access to recent passwords, and when I create new passwords they get access to those too. If I'm not aware that my master password has been compromised (why should I be?) then I'd be merrily creating new passwords that are compromised at the moment of their creation. Don't roll your own crypto, kids.
- dopu 10y ago
  > Here, if someone gets my master password all is lost. Not true. They'd need to know your keywords, which don't necessarily have to be "github" or "facebook" -- e.g., you could choose a consistent pattern, yielding "git##hub" and "face##book".
  - winstonewert 10y ago
    ok, yes. They'd also have to figure out my keywords. Still less secure then having to steal my encrypted passwords.
zwass 10y ago
Can anyone comment as to how this differs from something like http://passwordmaker.org http://passwordmaker.org? I've used that for quite a while, but it seems to have little support these days and I would consider moving on.
CogDisco 10y ago
I think it's more a password manager that doesn't manage passwords. You can't set an expiry date on a password. You can't change a password if it's compromised. You don't know when a master password was created so you can change it. If you change your master password you have to change every password you care about. You can't introduce new entropy. You have to manually specify a keyword scheme (and presumably store it yourself). You can't store metadata in case the website decides it's changed from usernames to email addresses and you've forgotten which one you used for what. You can't change the master password independently of the individual passwords. In actual password management, this program makes you specify, store and organize it all yourself. And without significantly more security than a traditional password manager like Keepass. It seems a bit cocky to call it "Visionary".
- readams 10y ago
  I think the idea is there's a keyword used to salt the password and you could use change the keyword if the password needs to be changed.
  - kichik 10y ago
    That forces you to remember which "version" of the keyword you're on. Was I on github1? github56? etc. It makes the management part even more manual.
- kichik 10y ago
  And it can't accommodate websites having weird password requirements. Some websites require symbols and some have maximum number of characters. Fixing this would probably require special characters in the keyword which would force you to remember the website's original password requirements on top of the keyword itself.
  - yoha 10y ago
    Very good point! Since some websites still require PIN codes (passwords made of digits), you would have to restrict yourself to something like 8 digit long password, which is not very secure, even with a slow hash (scrypt iteration).
paulddraper 10y ago
"Deterministic password generator" is perhaps the better title.
janitor61 10y ago
These types of deterministic password generators usually have an issue with inflexibility - you can't change the generated password for a site without modifying the input parameters. I believe a good approach to this problem would be having some sort of online Bloom filter API where you could submit a hash of your input parameters and then query to see if the password has been "burnt". You'd be able to mark a generated password as "discarded", at which point the input params would be hashed using a different algorithm and added to the Bloom filter. Next time you use the frontend, the front end could perform the next iteration of hashing if the result was found in the Bloom filter.
- camperman 10y ago
  One Shall Pass which I use exclusively has a parameter which specifies the number of generations to run its algorithm. So you use your same input and same passphrase and just change the generation.
- hamburglar 10y ago
  I have one of my own design where this problem is solved by just having a "version" field in the hashed data. Bump it and the password changes, and you still have the ability to retrieve old passwords. I have been waiting for one of the good ones to incorporate this idea so I don't have to finish mine. ;) Edit: and I might as well mention my other feature that I haven't seen elsewhere, which is that the hashed data isn't used as the password directly, but rather is input to a transformation function which can take into consideration different password rules for different sites. This way if a site has a dumb rule like no exclamation points or an 8 character limit, I can still use my generator to manage the passwords, just with a lame final transform that limits the password space in the appropriate way.
StavrosK 10y ago
I've used this kind of thing (supergenpass) for years, but in the end the inflexibility got me. A word to the wise: Just use KeePass2. It's a fantastic piece of software, works with Chrome/Firefox (with extensions), has KeePass2Android, a fantastic Android app, and is completely free. Just do yourself a favor.
- stephengillie 10y ago
  How does KeePass2 rank in security against other password managers? I've used it for a while, and haven't heard either way. The Android app has good Dropbox integration, which really streamlines mobile password use.
  - briHass 10y ago
    Near the top. They were informally audited by a university research team, and the few issues they found have long since been corrected. The fact that it is offline, open-source, and (on Windows) uses the standard Win crypto libraries gives it an advantage over Lastpass or 1Password.
    - mangix 10y ago
      hahaha it has extremely fast cracking speeds in hashcat due to bad KDF. iterated AES. ROFL.
      - gnoway 10y ago
        This reply was sufficiently aggravating to make me go do some research. Here's a thread[0] from last year bringing up some issues with KeePass2 code. It also links to an audit by some group that appears to be involved in information security for the French government[1]. It's in French. The HN comment asserts the audit found KeePass2 2.10 portable to be safe; I don't comprehend French so I don't know what the audit says. The documentation[2] specifies that the default KDF uses 6000 rounds of AES, although that is configurable, so presumably 'hahaha...extremely fast cracking speeds' could be improved to 'fast cracking speeds' or even 'moderate to slow cracking speeds'. KeePass has had one published vulnerability[3]; it applies to KeePass v1.17, so should not be a concern anymore. I will continue to use KeePass2. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9727297 [1] http://www.ssi.gouv.fr/uploads/IMG/cspn/anssi-cspn_2010-07fr.pdf [2] http://keepass.info/help/base/security.html#secdictprotect [3] https://www.cvedetails.com/product/23054/Keepass-Keepass.html?vendor_id=12214
js2 10y ago
This password manager is: scrypt( password=master_password, salt=keyword, r=1, p=1, N=2048, dkLen=32 ).encode('hex')[:password_len] https://github.com/libeclipse/visionary/blob/8c5f6e1c/visionarypm/__init__.py#L10 https://github.com/libeclipse/visionary/blob/8c5f6e1c/vision... https://github.com/ricmoo/pyscrypt#api https://github.com/ricmoo/pyscrypt#api http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html
rkeene2 10y ago
WebPass ( https://webpass.rkeene.org/ https://webpass.rkeene.org/ ) does a very similar thing.
yifanlu 10y ago
In terms of security, this doesn't improve anything (all security hinges on the master password). In terms of flexibility, this is a lot worse than a secure password manager.
TsomArp 10y ago
I use PasswordMaker.org. Sadly it stopped being updated.
xvolter 10y ago
I've seen many implementations of this exact thing, the basic ones are just sha1 or sha2(master + website domain) which generates a unique "password" for each site. This is just another implementation of the same idea. I've seen a few releases of simple scripts that do this for you as well, some work as bookmarklets, browser extensions, or single-page app websites. Visionary being a Python script I think makes it less portable, harder to use for average users, and definitely not mobile-device friendly.
daveguy 10y ago
passpack.com is what I use. Easy to access and secure. I just wish they had a totp two-part auth instead of yubikey.
denoyse 10y ago
Same concept as http://masterpasswordapp.com/ http://masterpasswordapp.com/ ?
aldanor 10y ago
Not a single objective reason to switch from e.g. 1Password.
viralpoetry 10y ago
I have published experimental chrome extension which derives password from url, salt, and passphrase on the fly: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alzheimer-password-genera/emclcafdgdeodlhpenmejdapecfgenof https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alzheimer-password... Source code & threat model: https://github.com/viralpoetry/password-generator https://github.com/viralpoetry/password-generator
luke-stanley 10y ago
I made similar, but with the advantage of easy typing on mobile: https://github.com/lukestanley/mobileFriendlyMasterPass/ https://github.com/lukestanley/mobileFriendlyMasterPass/ It has an Android, Python and JS implementation. Related http://masterpasswordapp.com http://masterpasswordapp.com doesn't have easy typing but is more popular

53 points by libeclipse 10y ago

> 1. Your passwords are generated on-the-fly based on a pure algorithm > 2. Nothing is stored so there’s nothing to steal [...] > 4. No need to sync data, as there’s nothing to sync! If there's only one possible password for a given website, and every password is stateless, how do you change the password if it's compromised?

pstrateman 10y ago
Even worse, how do you handle sites that restrict valid passwords?
- duaneb 10y ago
  Yea, that makes this approach useless.
stephanerangaya 10y ago
i was thinking the same, maybe you change the keyword, but then you need to remember that you changed it.. not very convenient.
- msl09 10y ago
  Yeah, my personal password manager is mostly that but with salt and other shenanigans, the algorithm is : bytestring = hash(master_password + url_domain + random_salt + persona) password = translate( bytestring, alphanumeric + special_symbols_required_for_the_site )[:max_allowed_length_for_website] print(password) storage[(url_domain, persona)] = ( random_salt, max_allowed_length_for_website, special_symbols_required_for_the_site ) The advantage is that it's safer than password managers that store your passwords or require you to send your password over the internet, and it's more flexible than managers that do not store any information. The problem is that you need to copy your database file to each device you use , that can be specially frustrating when I need to use android, for instance.

bascule 10y ago

Deterministic password schemes seem to pop up pretty frequently. Here's one of the most famous: https://www.pwdhash.com/ https://www.pwdhash.com/

curryhoward 10y ago
A few others: 1) SuperGenPass - http://www.supergenpass.com/ http://www.supergenpass.com/ 2) Vault - https://github.com/jcoglan/vault https://github.com/jcoglan/vault 3) Hashpass - https://www.stephanboyer.com/post/101/hashpass-a-stateless-password-manager-for-chrome https://www.stephanboyer.com/post/101/hashpass-a-stateless-p... (Disclaimer: I made #3) One suggestion for improvement for the OP: make this a browser extension. Probably more convenient than switching to a terminal whenever you want to log into something.

winstonewert 10y ago

This strikes me as less secure then a password manager that stores passwords. Here, if someone gets my master password all is lost. With stored passwords, they'd have to get both my master password and the encrypted passwords.

alextgordon 10y ago
It also lacks what you might call 'forward secrecy'. If someone gets access to my master password and an old 1password backup, then they get all the passwords in the backup. But with this, if someone gets access to my master password, they get access to recent passwords, and when I create new passwords they get access to those too. If I'm not aware that my master password has been compromised (why should I be?) then I'd be merrily creating new passwords that are compromised at the moment of their creation. Don't roll your own crypto, kids.
dopu 10y ago
> Here, if someone gets my master password all is lost. Not true. They'd need to know your keywords, which don't necessarily have to be "github" or "facebook" -- e.g., you could choose a consistent pattern, yielding "git##hub" and "face##book".
- winstonewert 10y ago
  ok, yes. They'd also have to figure out my keywords. Still less secure then having to steal my encrypted passwords.

zwass 10y ago

Can anyone comment as to how this differs from something like http://passwordmaker.org http://passwordmaker.org? I've used that for quite a while, but it seems to have little support these days and I would consider moving on.

CogDisco 10y ago

I think it's more a password manager that doesn't manage passwords. You can't set an expiry date on a password. You can't change a password if it's compromised. You don't know when a master password was created so you can change it. If you change your master password you have to change every password you care about. You can't introduce new entropy. You have to manually specify a keyword scheme (and presumably store it yourself). You can't store metadata in case the website decides it's changed from usernames to email addresses and you've forgotten which one you used for what. You can't change the master password independently of the individual passwords. In actual password management, this program makes you specify, store and organize it all yourself. And without significantly more security than a traditional password manager like Keepass. It seems a bit cocky to call it "Visionary".

readams 10y ago
I think the idea is there's a keyword used to salt the password and you could use change the keyword if the password needs to be changed.
- kichik 10y ago
  That forces you to remember which "version" of the keyword you're on. Was I on github1? github56? etc. It makes the management part even more manual.
kichik 10y ago
And it can't accommodate websites having weird password requirements. Some websites require symbols and some have maximum number of characters. Fixing this would probably require special characters in the keyword which would force you to remember the website's original password requirements on top of the keyword itself.
- yoha 10y ago
  Very good point! Since some websites still require PIN codes (passwords made of digits), you would have to restrict yourself to something like 8 digit long password, which is not very secure, even with a slow hash (scrypt iteration).

paulddraper 10y ago

"Deterministic password generator" is perhaps the better title.

janitor61 10y ago

These types of deterministic password generators usually have an issue with inflexibility - you can't change the generated password for a site without modifying the input parameters. I believe a good approach to this problem would be having some sort of online Bloom filter API where you could submit a hash of your input parameters and then query to see if the password has been "burnt". You'd be able to mark a generated password as "discarded", at which point the input params would be hashed using a different algorithm and added to the Bloom filter. Next time you use the frontend, the front end could perform the next iteration of hashing if the result was found in the Bloom filter.

camperman 10y ago
One Shall Pass which I use exclusively has a parameter which specifies the number of generations to run its algorithm. So you use your same input and same passphrase and just change the generation.
hamburglar 10y ago
I have one of my own design where this problem is solved by just having a "version" field in the hashed data. Bump it and the password changes, and you still have the ability to retrieve old passwords. I have been waiting for one of the good ones to incorporate this idea so I don't have to finish mine. ;) Edit: and I might as well mention my other feature that I haven't seen elsewhere, which is that the hashed data isn't used as the password directly, but rather is input to a transformation function which can take into consideration different password rules for different sites. This way if a site has a dumb rule like no exclamation points or an 8 character limit, I can still use my generator to manage the passwords, just with a lame final transform that limits the password space in the appropriate way.

StavrosK 10y ago

I've used this kind of thing (supergenpass) for years, but in the end the inflexibility got me. A word to the wise: Just use KeePass2. It's a fantastic piece of software, works with Chrome/Firefox (with extensions), has KeePass2Android, a fantastic Android app, and is completely free. Just do yourself a favor.

stephengillie 10y ago
How does KeePass2 rank in security against other password managers? I've used it for a while, and haven't heard either way. The Android app has good Dropbox integration, which really streamlines mobile password use.
- briHass 10y ago
  Near the top. They were informally audited by a university research team, and the few issues they found have long since been corrected. The fact that it is offline, open-source, and (on Windows) uses the standard Win crypto libraries gives it an advantage over Lastpass or 1Password.
  - mangix 10y ago
    hahaha it has extremely fast cracking speeds in hashcat due to bad KDF. iterated AES. ROFL.
    - gnoway 10y ago
      This reply was sufficiently aggravating to make me go do some research. Here's a thread[0] from last year bringing up some issues with KeePass2 code. It also links to an audit by some group that appears to be involved in information security for the French government[1]. It's in French. The HN comment asserts the audit found KeePass2 2.10 portable to be safe; I don't comprehend French so I don't know what the audit says. The documentation[2] specifies that the default KDF uses 6000 rounds of AES, although that is configurable, so presumably 'hahaha...extremely fast cracking speeds' could be improved to 'fast cracking speeds' or even 'moderate to slow cracking speeds'. KeePass has had one published vulnerability[3]; it applies to KeePass v1.17, so should not be a concern anymore. I will continue to use KeePass2. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9727297 [1] http://www.ssi.gouv.fr/uploads/IMG/cspn/anssi-cspn_2010-07fr.pdf [2] http://keepass.info/help/base/security.html#secdictprotect [3] https://www.cvedetails.com/product/23054/Keepass-Keepass.html?vendor_id=12214

js2 10y ago

This password manager is: scrypt( password=master_password, salt=keyword, r=1, p=1, N=2048, dkLen=32 ).encode('hex')[:password_len] https://github.com/libeclipse/visionary/blob/8c5f6e1c/visionarypm/__init__.py#L10 https://github.com/libeclipse/visionary/blob/8c5f6e1c/vision... https://github.com/ricmoo/pyscrypt#api https://github.com/ricmoo/pyscrypt#api http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html

rkeene2 10y ago

WebPass ( https://webpass.rkeene.org/ https://webpass.rkeene.org/ ) does a very similar thing.

yifanlu 10y ago

In terms of security, this doesn't improve anything (all security hinges on the master password). In terms of flexibility, this is a lot worse than a secure password manager.

TsomArp 10y ago

I use PasswordMaker.org. Sadly it stopped being updated.

xvolter 10y ago

I've seen many implementations of this exact thing, the basic ones are just sha1 or sha2(master + website domain) which generates a unique "password" for each site. This is just another implementation of the same idea. I've seen a few releases of simple scripts that do this for you as well, some work as bookmarklets, browser extensions, or single-page app websites. Visionary being a Python script I think makes it less portable, harder to use for average users, and definitely not mobile-device friendly.

daveguy 10y ago

passpack.com is what I use. Easy to access and secure. I just wish they had a totp two-part auth instead of yubikey.

denoyse 10y ago

Same concept as http://masterpasswordapp.com/ http://masterpasswordapp.com/ ?

aldanor 10y ago

Not a single objective reason to switch from e.g. 1Password.

viralpoetry 10y ago

I have published experimental chrome extension which derives password from url, salt, and passphrase on the fly: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alzheimer-password-genera/emclcafdgdeodlhpenmejdapecfgenof https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alzheimer-password... Source code & threat model: https://github.com/viralpoetry/password-generator https://github.com/viralpoetry/password-generator

luke-stanley 10y ago

I made similar, but with the advantage of easy typing on mobile: https://github.com/lukestanley/mobileFriendlyMasterPass/ https://github.com/lukestanley/mobileFriendlyMasterPass/ It has an Android, Python and JS implementation. Related http://masterpasswordapp.com http://masterpasswordapp.com doesn't have easy typing but is more popular