Bruno Ranschaert, S.D.I.-Consulting BVBA, © 2006
Password Tracker
is an
application to keep your passwords in an encrypted file on disk,
protected by a pass phrase so that they are safe. Even if the file
containing your passwords falls in the wrong hands, the pass phrase is
needed to decrypt it. The application uses the unpatented
Blowfish encryption algorithm which was invented by Bruce
Schneier.
The encryption is reasonably safe. The application is based
on
the Password
Safe application from Bruce Schneier, it aims to
be compatible with it. The application is available
under the GNU
GPL.
-
Take a look at the quick start
page to get started.
- Password Tracker homepage: http://patra.sourceforge.net
- S.D.I.-Consulting home: http://www.sdi-consulting.com
History and Goal
I started using the original Password Safe
application from Bruce Schneier, which was a native windows application, and I still find it very useful. I try
to maintain a number of different computers running different OS's. On
Linux I am using WINE to run password safe. I didn't want to be "locked
in" in an old format that I didn't understand, I was afraid
my
data would get lost at some point. Therefore, I wanted to be able to
decode the file format myself to be able to recover my data if this
would be necessary. Some things were bothering me a little bit regarding the
application.
- No easy buttons to copy uid/pwd (both, not only
the password).
- Cross platform - no dependency on WINE - PC,
Linux, OSX.
- New password safe format 2.0.
- Import/export to plain text to prevent lock-in.
- Changing the password generating stuff, sometimes
I need longer/shorter passwords with other requirements.
The current Password
Safe
project hosts a Java version as well but I decided not to investigate
this solution further. I noticed that there has been progress on the
Java version since I started my own implementation, but I
did not investigate it further. These remarks are probably not valid anymore
at this point in time.
- Code not clear and clean.
- I am a Java developer myself.
- Dependency on external libs.
So I decided to rewrite the complete application from scratch without
reusing code. Simple to install, clean lean interface, a handy polished
tool.
Credits
Idea of the application comes from the Password Safe
application.
This was first written by Bruce Schneier, and than transferred to the
open source community. It is now available at:
http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net.
The Password Safe
project was
important to know the file format, especially the header format which is not trivial.
I
found some more information about the file format in another open
source project which is also based on the Password Safe
application. It
is the Password
Safe password database application which can be found at:
http://nsd.dyndns.org/pwsafe.
Password generator:
- The classification system (11 categories) comes from a
script written by David Finch. The generator algorithm does not, I wrote this myself.
Encryption:
- Written from scratch based on the example provided by Bruce
Schneier in the book: "Applied
Cryptography , Second Edition", John Wiley
& Sons, 1996, ISBN 0-471-11709-9.
Libraries:
- The prepackaged version uses the JGoodies Looks
look and feel. You can find more information on the JGoodies website: http://www.jgoodies.com.
It is distributed under this
license.
- The icons used in the application are the standard Sun Java icons, they are distributed under this license.