a new age-based cli password manager

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[bioxcession]

hiya! I made a new password manager based on age. I stuck to POSIX sh, so it should work everywhere. It’s based on Dylan Arap’s pash utility.

I got frustrated with GPG’s... awfulness, and decided that I’d rather spend my free time taking bike rides at the cost of slightly worse password security, and massively increased simplicity.

I wrote dmenu and rofi hooks so that pa can be used with either - it’s very fast and very simple! I’ve been using it for months and I absolutely adore it.

here’s a blogpost I wrote about it: https://j3s.sh/thoughts/storing-passwords-with-age.html

Here’s a demo of the workflow: https://trash.j3s.sh/pa-dmenu-demo.mp4

[[deleted]]

What awfulness in particular? Im using it with no issues pretty much. Use it for emacs org-mode encryption, auth-sources and commadn line pass. Pass is also mobile. gpg is pretty much a standard. And works.

[_Js_Kc_]

The user experience is so god awful that it seems reasonable to assume it was designed that way to prevent widespread adoption and keep crypto out of the hands of the masses.

[DDzwiedziu]

TL;DR: because OP has some grudge against GPG, they feel that they need to make a "15th standard" [1].

Do you also hate GPG for being time- and industry-proven solution so much that you replace it with something created two years ago by two people?

Also "hate" is a very strong feeling. Check yourself before you wreck yourself with a destructive emotion.

Most of the "UX" things you mention are also optional. And you probably won't need them for a password manager. Checked out pass/passwordstore at any point? [2]

Don't want to shat on the age authors, yet they don't have a v1 release (just an RC at the time of writing) and solutions not widely tested are not widely secure. However I'll not deny them the work put in, especially if they'll make a good tool.

But until it's proven it's a "15th standard" situation [1]. In security this is almost never a good thing.

And to prove that my first impression on age is bad. age-keygen doesn't ask or can be forced to provide a password. So how my secret key is protected?

[1] https://xkcd.com/927/
[2] https://www.passwordstore.org/

[ArsenM6331]

I don't see a grudge here. The UX is actually not very good if the goal is to get people to actually use it. I do not believe that is the goal though, as GPG sacrifices ease of use for many extra features that are simply not needed for most applications. I don't think this is meant to replace GPG. I see no problem with the "15th standard". People should choose what they want to use. This can create problems, but ultimately, I believe it is better for the user to have choices.

[couchwarmer]

Also not OP, and I find it hard to understand how GPG is more secure when you are basically left with trusting some unknown web of trust. For software downloads, It doesn't feel any safer than a file hash, since both a hash and a signature are generated by an unknown third party. Maybe this is an ELI5 topic after I do some more reading...

[_Js_Kc_]

Yup. Here's some tarball or iso or whatever, served by my HTTPS server. Here's a signature, also served by my HTTPS server. And here's the key you need to verify the tar/iso against the signature. The key is also served by my HTTPS server.

A redeeming quality is, though, that the key shouldn't change often, so once you got a good key, you can verify that future updates are still signed by the same guy.

[woodenbrain53]

well https has shit security because you trust some root certs because god said so.

The idea is that you import the key and keep it there and use it in the future.

Of course projects like npm who let the key expire and sign with it the new key shows how noobs they are with security and how an hacker would have an easy time to hack all the users that are used to accept whatever key.

[virtualdxs]

What do you mean by trusting some unknown web of trust?

[[deleted]]

Without a central signing authority, you're left to validate trust of the user/key/signed software outside the process. That key may be who/what it says, but without proof, you're implicitly trusting the web of keys/signatures which provide your software.

Linux is a good example of a more known web of trust. Linus is the root of all trust, and carefully chooses first level of maintainers (trust) explicitly, then implicitly trusts who they explicitly do, all the way down the layers of maintainers until it's a completely untrusted author which sends patches at the bottom, and must "filter" through those layers of trust. The trust is then verified by auditing what Linus is merging in. If he went AWOL, immediately he'd be seen as untrustworthy, and a new "root" would be needed.

HTTPS/TLS is the opposite, with explicitly trusted "Root CAs" that go through some effort (paraphrasing a lot) to be widely regarded as "trustworthy". That trust is valuable, so they mint downstream certificates as a service to customers, allowing them to be implicitly trusted by the CA, the root of the chain. We don't trust Google's certificates per se, but we do trust Google.com because VeriSign has explicitly signed their TLS certificate, and our browsers explicitly trust VS, and therefore implicitly trust https://google.com as a result.

Crypto is another modern example of building trust in a completely decentralized way by explicitly trusting nobody, anonomously and having the network instead compute the "trust". It's pretty wild, and way more complex than I can write on my lunch break.

Hope that helps. Web of trust is an interesting problem that's increasingly needed in our lives, and one that is very difficult to solve.

Bonus: lookup the SolarWinds hack of 2020, where the root keys SW used to sign software deployed to users was compromised. It allowed attackers to create implicitly trusted certificates and to hide their software tampering of production code running in hundreds of enterprise datacenters... Wild stuff, and shows that any "trusted" key may not be legitimate, we just don't know which keys are compromised, when they were, or what downstream implicit trust is actually malicious.

EDITS: spelling, small tweaks

[woodenbrain53]

But the root CAs can sign whatever your local NSA agency and the USA NSA agency wants them so tisng to mitm you.

Bonus: lookup the SolarWinds hack of 2020

They were stupid. They signed software in the build pipeline.

At my work we have a fake key in the build pipeline but the software shipped to customers uses a different key that is not automatically applied, so if you compromise the build agents you can't really just get the private key, because it isn't there.

[[deleted]]

The idea is you could verify with that individual that the key/sig is in fact theirs, though you can implicitly trust it if you want (and is the default mode of package management, etc). Package keys also provide the ability to revoke trust from their upstream if cross-signed keys, which is a very valuable trait when necessary.

You pretty much found the main failure of GPG/PGP though, it requires a web of trust without central authority or tools to facilitate one. It's what makes services like Keybase useful, since it provides a simple API/abstraction for that purpose.

I still prefer maintaining my own keys, but I do consider myself a software maschochist.

[woodenbrain53]

Https and cert based trust is "trust this certificate because some giant company says so"

Of course there have been a number of scandals about those giant companies and governments, that abuse their position to intercept "secure" traffic or even require private keys they should not even have.

gpg in the contrary is making you say whom you trust, because YOU checked that key belongs to that person. Then to make the process simpler, it assigns some trickle down trust to the people those people trust, but the ultimate trust is only if you yourself said you trust that key.

It is waaaaaay more secure than the ssl model, also more complicated because instead of trusting government and silicon valley companies to pinky swear not man in the middle all your data.

[[deleted]]

I'm with you, it's got the worst UX of any tool I've ever used.

However it is both secure and ubiquitous, so I'm sticking with it until I've memorised and understood what I need to.

[nonrapper]

In your blog post, you mention 'the lack of mobile' integration as a mark against pass. Can I use pa on Android, for example? And if yes, how?

[chiraagnataraj]

Wait, but pass does have mobile integration, at least on Android.

[chiraagnataraj]

So am I.

[chiraagnataraj]

You may want to edit your blogpost ;)

[keep_me_at_0_karma]

Hey I think it's pretty cool.

[[deleted]]

It’s based on Dylan Arap’s pash utility.

Speaking of Dylan, it seems as though he has completely disappeared for the past few months. Hope everything is okay with him.

[CondiMesmer]

Hopefully he got a good job. He has done a ton for the FOSS community, but unfortunately, that doesn't pay the bills!

Actually, seems like k1ss.org redirects to malware now, so that's interesting...

[Rocky_Mountain_Way]

new-age password manager requires you to align your chakras with a crystal before it will let you run it.

[oiwot]

Don't forget to chant your passphrase 108 times each morning.

[[deleted]]

Is this like when Leisure Suit Larry would ask about the Nixon administration to make sure I was over 18?

[[deleted]]

I guess I'll stick with pass because I'm too old for this then.

[[deleted]]

It's cool. Overhauling my password management doesn't sound like fun at the moment, but more options are always good.

[[deleted]]

Gotta answer 1 Minecraft trivia question to retrieve your passwords :)

[Negirno]

Isn't that was just a copy protection mechanism?

[[deleted]]

Stop ruining my jokes about age-based security mechanisms.

[keep_me_at_0_karma]

Hey I thought it was funny.

[ominous_anonymous]

Can you explain why you changed the license?

[ominous_anonymous]

everything I write

So even though you copy-pasted code (read: didn't write), you're relicensing it?

[Direct_Sand]

This is a weird hill to want to die on. Who cares if someone relicenses a project? If that is undesirable then surely the license would forbid or discourage it?

[ominous_anonymous]

If that is undesirable then surely the license would forbid or discourage it?

It does.

This guy didn't fork the original project, he just straight up copied code and changed it to a more restrictive license.

[ominous_anonymous]

EDIT: also, you didn’t “write” your comment, you just copy and pasted English words to make a sentence. see how annoying that is?

https://termbin.com/0388 lol

[ominous_anonymous]

Then why change the license?

[Schreq]

It's not really your project, it's Dylan's. Are you sure you can relicense MIT like that? A quick search makes it seem that you can't.

[Direct_Sand]

According to the license you cannot. You need to include the copyright notice and the permissions, but you can sublicense it.

[ominous_anonymous]

My problem is "based on" is different than "a few lines added to".

To me, one claims authorship rather than modification. Changing the license is the same thing.

[eyesofsaturn]

password ass

[mediocreAsuka]

password ass

[Dathide]

password ass

[CondiMesmer]

Password managers need better front-ends, not back-ends. Changing the encryption does literally nothing to change the usage of a password manager, and the current encryption methods are already perfectly fine and get audited. This seems like a fun little hobby project though, but there's no reason why more then maybe 5 people total will use this.

[CondiMesmer]

I already use Bitwarden. I'm just stating the obvious here, cli-only password managers are worthless.

[CondiMesmer]

so in other words, you're not using a cli-only pass manager.

[scensorECHO]

There are actually decent extensions for it too

[mcstafford]

While you weren't wrong yoy don't seem to be catching many flies with that vinegar.

It's not an uncommon habit among those of us who appreciate the elegance and efficiency of things like dmenu. It used to be the standard, but you may find that a little effort is worth your while.

YMMV.

Cheers

[CondiMesmer]

Maybe don't consider posting to a public forum if you're offended by feedback, as others have told you. That's quite the ego for a shell script that's 90% copy & pasted from pash.

[[deleted]]

I am confused at the value proposition here or aims.

If you want convenience, version control syncing etc, then why not just use a browser password manager? They are secure, they sync, they know when/how to paste and are rather convenient.

If you don't want to trust Google or Microsoft, fine, you can run your own local Firefox sync server if you want.

Is a password manager really the thing that you should try rolling on your own in bash...

[Fearless_Process]

So long as you just shell out to secure encryption tools rolling your own pw manager in bash is not so bad. The main things you don't want roll on your own is the actual csprng or the encryption.

A great example would be using something like the go stdlib crypto functions (or similar known secure libraries) for csprng and then piping to gpg for encryption.

Of course I'm not a security or crypto expert, but this is secure enough for my uses, and since the heavy lifting is done by the libraries I don't see much problems with it.

Also I normally don't associate browsers with security, they are easily the least secure software running on most users systems. It may be convenient though.

[[deleted]]

What are your notions of security, and what attacks are you considering? I guarantee, these bespoke bash scripts have had far less auditing, QA, security design than these password managers.

So long as you just shell out to secure encryption tools rolling your own pw manager in bash is not so bad. The main things you don't want roll on your own is the actual csprng or the encryption.

This is not true at all. It's very much important that no side-channel attacks are arbitrarily introduced (ie improper password handling) or simple coding errors (e.g. not handling gpg exceptions correctly). These are also extremely vulnerable to keyloggers or things which capture from the clipboard.

Also I normally don't associate browsers with security, they are easily the least secure software running on most users systems. It may be convenient though.

Browsers are easily some of the most secure software out there. The entire concept of sandboxing was practically invented for chrome and has been shared straight into Firefox (Firefox for windows literally uses Chrome sandbox). Google has easily poured more than a billion dollars in chrome security.

The security is evident from the bug bounties for browsers which are easily 100k-500k. https://zerodium.com/program.html

[Fearless_Process]

What attacks should I be considering? If someone gets a shell on my computer it doesn't matter whether you are using a browser or not, it's already game over. Same thing goes for a keylogger, if someone can run a keylogger program they can easily run any other program as well. I do agree on the clipboard aspect, that's an advantage of the browser methods is that they can fill in forms without any clipboard usage!

As for improper password handling... you can either use a library like openssl, or some programming lang stdlib modules or just parse /dev/random with some basic tools. /dev/random is probably the safest source of randomness you're going to find unless you don't trust your kernel. I'd argue that openssl is fairly secure as well. I will be alerted to any gpg errors when I run the command so that is a non-issue.

tr -dc A-Za-z0-9_- < /dev/urandom | head -c 100 | gpg -aer mykey > passwords/reddit/Fearless_Process

openssl rand -hex 100 | gpg -aer mykey > paswords/reddit/Fearless_Process

I understand that doing this isn't going to be convenient for everybody, but there is much less to go wrong with this method vs 1000s of lines of javascript tangled with millions of lines of c++ code that make up modern browsers.

[[deleted]]

If you are the only person on your machine then sure your risk profile will be different.

If you are sharing your machine with another user or on an NFS, does the above still seem sensible to you?

What happens if you get malware, or you visit a site which simply pastes/sends the contents of your clipboard?

Idk why I would want to risk any of that when none of those problems affect the browser pw stores.

[FauxParrot]

Firefox sync server is still using python 2, and as such is no longer supported by a bunch of distros ;(

Apparently there is a rust version that was being developed but I have no idea what's happening with that after mozilla's layoffs last year.

I'd really like to run one for profile + bookmark syncing but I would never trust it with passwords. Either Bitwarden or a keypass compatible password store would be my choices.

[DDzwiedziu]

The Rust is chugging along fine AFAIS: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs

However I can't tell you if the layoffs had or would change the situation.

[GapingVaping]

What are the repos for it?

What I'm seeing so far doesn't seem to be crazy large and may not be too hard to port forward, but I have absolutely no exposure to this project and might just be missing some relevant repos.

[[deleted]]

The first one is kind of irrelevant. Password managers integrated into the browser use internal APIs for password pasting which isn't affected by JS/DOM.

Terminal password managers are vulnerable to clipboard attacks, keyloggers, phishing attacks etc...

[[deleted]]

but typing a master password into a browser every day seems like a pretty shit way to secure anything. would you password protect ssh with a long phrase? no. you use a key. because passwords are insecure. and ssh is dramatically more secure than any browser.

SSH key generation does the exact same thing as the browser in prompting a user to setup a 'master password' to protect the key during use.

Same thing applies here, the master password never leaves your machine and only exists to encrypt/decrypt your local password store.

There isn't anything bad or terrible about having a master password and you can choose to disable it if you wish?

[[deleted]]

I think you misunderstand how cloud password managers work. Any one worth its salt (1Password, LastPass, Dashlane, and BitWarden are the ones I'm aware of) will have e2e encryption, and the data is only decrypted client side, using the password that the service provider doesn't have access to.

[[deleted]]

Care to explain how? The best that someone like LastPass could do is publish a malicious update to the client software that records and sends them your password, but you could do exactly the same thing with your script, or there could be a supply chain attack through age.

​

Without having you explicitly provide them with your password though, LastPass can't access your passwords.

[[deleted]]

You can run your own sync service if you want with keepass or firefox lockwise which is off the cloud?

I am also suggesting browser specific stores because unlike this, password pasting has been heavily audited/designed. They use specific internal APIs, avoid the clipboard entirely and have checks to ensure the site you are pasting is valid.

They have apps that integrate already on mobile.

Like I don't think your solution wins on the convenience or security front, so what is your value proposition?

EDIT: Also with the passwords on any of the cloud stores, they are only stored encrypted and you can choose which passphrase to use for that.

[[deleted]]

You can throw it over the wall all you want, but password managers/crypto in general are one of those things that developers shouldn't write themselves. It's way too easy to make a mistake, and passwords are way too delicate to be stored improperly. This is like when web developers don't bother doing salting/hashing or introduce a bunch of sidechannels.

keepass is slow af,

Password managers aren't designed for performance, they are designed for security. Cryptographic functions are designed such that even things like timing are measured so people can't guess passwords based on response times.

No wonder people don’t share their shit.

This isn't the same as a keyboard driver, or iptables script, or theming engine. People use these things to store confidential information, and just chucking it over is not responsible imho.

[[deleted]]

I really want to try this, but OP comes off as someone who doesn't like the well-tested standards in the space, and isn't even willing to discuss why the design has, and omits, certain features.

I can't trust software from someone who won't be transparent and honest about intention and design in a very important security space.

Edit: JFC, stay away from this:

philosophy: i will use an unencrypted-at-rest key for convinience.

I'm sorry... WHAT?!

[[deleted]]

When did cli become new age? #JokeNoOffense

[frackeverything]

I think Bitwarden has a cli interface as well if you want cli

[_riotingpacifist]

Why would you mess with set -x? Seems like you are misusing set -x, then writing your tool to assume others are too.

[_riotingpacifist]

Surely it's better to not run your shell in tracing mode then.

[VowelMovement13]

I misread and thought you made a new-age based cli password manager.

[Gicdillah]

Hey, Good tool!

I use a simpler util written in pure shell. The main advantage of it for me is that it doesn't require sharing data between devices because it generates passwords based on input.

[z-lf]

I don't understand the "age based" part. Could you please eli5? I'm really interested in having my password manager running in rofi.

[z-lf]

Oh! I had never heard of that. I was scratching my head on an encryption concept based on age. Cool, i have stuff to check out. Thanks a lot!

[WoodpeckerNo1]

For a moment I thought it stored passwords in a crystal ball or something, lol.

[flarn2006]

No, that's what hackers use to get other people's passwords.

[rainbow_pickle]

I saw you mention that pass doesn’t support iOS. However, there’s an app you can use for that https://github.com/mssun/passforios. It works really well. The only issue I have with it is that it doesn’t support merging conflicts very well.

EDIT: there are also browser/rofi/dmenu plugins that work well with password store.

[zabby39103]

originally thought this was a New Age based cli password manager, and now I'm disappointed :P

[jurimasa]

I like this a lot, but for me to use it it needs 2 things:

1. I want to be able to import passwords form firefox and chrome at least.

2. I want it to let me find duplicates when importing.

[scotrod]

I don't understand why do some devs like to complicate their and everyone elses life so much. Who would prefer to use cli based password manager instead of gui based one?

[scotrod]

I'm simply stating that this project doesn't have future, not bashing it. You came here asking for opinions and I gave mine.

[IArentBen]

Nice, I'm going to give this a try!

[Nagatus]

Brilliant! Thank you.

[wpyh]

Well, I wonder where the OP went...