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Show HN: Manage passwords with GPG

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Re: Show HN: Manage passwords with GPG

#43
post #13

I'm using Emacs for something similar. This works because Emacs can open .gpg files. It will decrypt them on opening (asking for your password) and encrypt on saving. This is very powerful in combination with Orgmode (.org), or any other module that provides auto-folding. So I open my .org.gpg file and everything is folded. Then I search for what I need, and only that part (containing some secrets) is unfolded. Of co…

I've been doing the same with vim for years, using this vim script: https://github.com/mct/dotfiles-public/blob/master/.vim/plug...

Re: Show HN: Manage passwords with GPG

#44
I was going to try use one of these solutions, when I read on the EFF that they all provide a single point of failure.

If anyone gets hold of your master key/pwd, they would have access to all your usernames & pwds.

https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/how-use-keepassx

Best to keep them separate - in your brain!

Re: Show HN: Manage passwords with GPG

#45
post #13

I'm using Emacs for something similar. This works because Emacs can open .gpg files. It will decrypt them on opening (asking for your password) and encrypt on saving. This is very powerful in combination with Orgmode (.org), or any other module that provides auto-folding. So I open my .org.gpg file and everything is folded. Then I search for what I need, and only that part (containing some secrets) is unfolded. Of co…

I'm not sure this is a good solution for this use case (password management).

The obvious way of getting the password out of the Emacs buffer is copy and paste, which leaves the password on the clipboard where it is very easy to find. Manually removing it (by copying something else) can't be relied upon. (If you use Klipper you have an even bigger problem.)

I know all bets are off with any kind of password manager if the host is compromised, but password managers and browser plugins presumably at least try to scrub passwords from memory, which will save you if you forget to lock your screen or your window manager has a screen lock bypass bug (very common).

The Emacs solution will protect you if you don't use full-disk encryption and your disk falls into the wrong hands, but that applies (or should apply) to all password managers.

What am I missing?

Edit: The same applies to the solution in the article.

Re: Show HN: Manage passwords with GPG

#46
post #33
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This nice solution is minimal, well scripted and very UNIXy. However, one tradeoff is that filenames for the stored password are plain. Running the tree command on the directory where encrypted files are stored would give us something like, $ tree .password-store irc ├── efnet └── freenode

For this reason I'm thinking of switching from gpg to encfs. It has an option for auto-unmounting after a period of unactivity. It would also play well with programs that need to read password from a file. Has anyone else here had the same thought? This guy seems to at least; https://github.com/equivrel/password-store-encfs/blob/master... Edit: spelling

Would be much easier and still acceptable to simply mount the password-store on encfs.

Could use autofs to make it auto mount when pass accesses the mount point.

Re: Show HN: Manage passwords with GPG

#47

I was going to try use one of these solutions, when I read on the EFF that they all provide a single point of failure. If anyone gets hold of your master key/pwd, they would have access to all your usernames & pwds. https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/how-use-keepassx Best to keep them separate - in your brain!

The best advice I had heard in ages!!!

I was also about to join the bandwagon of using a password manager.

Re: Show HN: Manage passwords with GPG

#49
A bit late to the party, but for anyone who loves pass/password-store etc, but does not like the entry names themselves being stored in the clear, I have a port of pass that fixes exactly that problem:

https://github.com/abgoyal/password-store2

Yes, it even has bash completion. Its fallen a bit behind the upstream as I have not had the time to port in the new features (nor felt the need :-/). Comments/patches welcome.

Re: Show HN: Manage passwords with GPG

#50
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if I could at least export from the OS X keychain (you can always write up a simple script to add them to pass). Internet accounts can be exported, but all the rest won't work. I've given up on it, but I'd like to know if anyone might have found something that I overlooked.

Have you tried the security commandline utility? As far as I know it reads anything you want from the keychain. For example, to grab what password Spotify is storing in my keychain: `security find-generic-password -s Spotify -w`

It's some time ago that I tried exporting, so I don't recall exactly what I did. As far as I know, I tried it with that command line tool but it simply wouldn't export everything.

There's also the issue that if it does export something, you have to accept every exported item individually. If you search the internet, you'll find people who wrote scripts for "automatic accept-clicking."

But as I said, once I looked up what it exported, I noticed that it was far from complete.But maybe there's some command line option buried somewhere that will accomplish what I wanted to do...

The whole export thing is just terribly broken.

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