Managing web passwords has been an minor annoyance for me for some time. For a
while I kept my web passwords in a plain text file that I had to manually
encrypt and decrypt every time I wanted to look up or add a password. Then I
moved my passwords over to index cards in an index card file. I wasn’t happy
with either method.

Apple’s Keychain password manager is a bit too byzantine. It’s also not very
portable to other computers. I’m impressed the technical wizardry of online
password manager Passpack, but I don’t
feel comfortable storing my passwords on a third party website that might
someday go out of business or accidentally lose its data.

So I wrote simplepass, a simple but secure command line program that stores
your web passwords in a file encrypted using the Blowfish cipher. The encryption method well documented, and you can see how it works by reading
the code. This
program is open source.

To store a password, you type

simplepass domain name

Where domain name is typically a website domain, e.g. yahoo.com. The domain can
also be any other string, e.g. “Gmail account”.

For example, if you enter

simplepass gmail.com

for the first time, simplepass will launch your text editor (whatever your
EDITOR environment variable has been set to, or
nano by default) and
present you with a simple form that you can fill out to save a login,
password, and arbitrary notes for that domain:

gmail.com login: password: notes:

You can leave any of the fields blank. So if you want, you can just fill out
the ‘notes’ portion for items that are not web logins, such as credit card
numbers and such.

Once you fill out the fields save the file and exit your editor, simplepass will
parse the information, encrypt it, store it in the database, and delete the
temporary file.

The next time you give the command,

simplepass gmail.com

simplepass will display something like this, via the ‘less’ command:

gmail.com login: funnyface password: audreyhepburn notes: I love gmail! blah… blah…

(We pipe the output to ‘less’ so as to leave no trace of your password in your
console, where someone can find it by scrolling up.)

The first time you launch simplepass, it will ask you to set a master password.
This password will unlock the simplepass database. This database is stored in
a single file: a partly encrypted text file called simplepass.db. This file
will be saved in the directory in which you invoked the simplepass command.
Always invoke simplepass from the same directory as the simplepass.db datafile.

The top part of this file is a message in plain text and just serves to remind
you of the file’s purpose. The bottom part is your password database, which is
nothing more than a YAML string encrypted with the Blowfish encryption
algorithm. Your master password is the the key that decrypts this portion of the
simplepass.db file. Do not edit this file directly; any edits may render the
data un-decryptable.

Type

simplepass —help

to see all the options. You can change your master password, print the entire
password database in a plain text format, and more.

REQUIREMENTS:

• crypt

INSTALL:

• sudo gem install simplepass

Source, Bug Reports, Feedback

To leave any feedback, please visit the RubyForge
page for this project. You can
file bug reports, request enhancements and features, and comment in a
discussion forum.