@myusernamehas25characters/pass v1.0.2

pass

As a developer/power user I always have a terminal open, and being able to manage my passwords there saves me the hassle of having to have a separate app open all the time, because honestly, copy-pasting a password into a web app once every few hours is really all I need from a password manager. If you want to know more about how it works (and assure yourself of its security), you can read through the Implementation details and I also encourage you to take a look at the code (Most of the interesting stuff happens in src/cryptography.js)!

Installation

You'll need Node.js & NPM (which is bundled with nodejs) to run this utility. To install, run the following command in the shell of your choice:

npm install -g @myusernamehas25characters/pass # Or, if you prefer yarn: yarn global add @myusernamehas25characters/pass

Test that pass is properly installed with the following command

pass -v

Once you're done, run pass init to create a passfile in your home directory

Usage

You can see the following help message by running pass -h or pass --help

Usage:

  $ pass [...options]

Options:

  -h, --help ........ Display this help message
  -v, --version ..... Display version information

Commands:

  init .............. Initiliase the passfile
  generate .......... Generate a new password for a service & keyword and save it in your passfile
  view .............. View a password
  remove ............ Delete a password
  store ............. Store an existing password in your passfile

pass init

Usage: pass init

This command will create your passfile. The passfile is a file located at the path <HOME_DIR>/.passfile which stores your passwords in their encrypted form.

The command will prompt you for a master password. This password will be required everytime you want to view, generate or store a password and will be used as an encryption key for your passfile.

Important Notice: If you forget your master password, all passwords in your passfile are permanently lost. Make sure to choose a master password that you can remeber

Example: pass init

pass generate

Usage: pass generate <service> [<keyword>]

This command will generate a new password and store it in your passfile. It command takes two parameters, <service> and <keyword>, of which only service is required.

service should be the name of the application or service you are creating a password for. keyword (optionally) contains an additional keyword like, for example an account name or wallet address that identifies this password. It allows you to have multiple passwords for the same service. For every combination of service and keyword, there may only be exactly one password stored.

The option keyword defaults to "*" when no value is specified.

Example: pass generate reddit myusername

pass view

Usage: pass view <service> [<keyword>]

This command will print the specified password to standard output. Its two parameters are the same as the ones described in pass generate.

If no value is specified for keyword, a prompt listing available keywords will be displayed.

Example: pass view reddit myusername or pass view reddit

pass remove

Usage: pass remove <service> [<keyword>]

This command deletes a password permanently from your passfile. The parameters are the same as described above (see pass generate).

If no value is specified for keyword, a prompt listing available keywords will be displayed.

Important Notice: The password will be delted permanently from your passfile and cannot be accessed again after it has been removed.

Example: pass remove reddit myusername or pass remove reddit

pass store

Usage: pass store <service> [<keyword>] <password>

This command can be used to store an already existing password in your passfile. The parameters service and keyword are the same as described above (see pass generate). keyword may be skipped

The parameter password contains the password that should be stored in the passfile.

If your password contains spaces, make sure to wrap it accordingly in "" double quotes.

Implementation details

Master password

The key used to encrypt the passfile is derived from the master password using the scrypt key derivation function in the implementation provided by the Node.js core crypto library.

For the sake of simplicity, pass always uses the literal string "salt" as the salt for scrypt, although this may be changed in the future.

The first line in the passfile will always be the encrypted form of the string "valid key", encrypted with the key generated from the master password. To test whether the master password is valid, pass will attempt to decrypt this first line with the given key, and display an error message if the algorithm a) throws an error or b) returns any value other than "valid key" as the result

Encryption

For encryption, pass uses the aes-192-cbc algorithm provide by the Node.js core crypto library along with a unique 24-byte initialization vector (similar to a salt; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initialization_vector)

Every line in the passfile, including the first line (see Master password) has the following format:

<hex-encoded cyphertext (variable length)> <hex-encoded IV (24 bytes)>

Where the IV is unique for every line.

Roadmap

• In the future, pass view will no longer require the option service and allow you to browse through a list of your services just like you can browse through a list of keywords

Credits

Here are some of the libraries I used to make my life (and yours) a bit easier while I built this project (I highly recommend you check them out!):

• chalk: A super nifty utility that makes it easy to deal with ANSI color codes in the terminal
• enquirer: A library with a huge variety of built-in user-friendly interactive prompts like the password prompt or the choice prompt I used in this project
• get-package-version from JSBits: A utility for getting the current version of a package from package.json that handles all kinds of npm package.json weirdness
• tauris: A super-easy and convenient library for parsing CLI arguments and generating help prompts. I use it in almost all of my CLI projects and I think it gets way to little credit