pashword VS KeePass2.x

This is beautifully done, great design work.

Scrypt for password stretching seems good. I see you're using CPU cost of 2^15. When storing a password hash you'd want to use 2^17 (with agility to change algorithm or increase cost in the future) [1]. Since you're not storing the result, I suspect the lower number is reasonable.

I don't like simple concatenation when building a salt from two variable length fields. You'll get the same salt for `"foo" + "bar"` and `"foob" + "ar"`, but the salt should be unique. Although I don't think that's an issue for this project since the first is a website.

Using the website in the salt has some issues when there are multiple domains that use the same password. Do I use mail.google.com, auth.google.com, or google.com? trello.com or atlassian.net? What if the website it bought and the new owner changes the domain name? With a password manager, I can just look in my vault to figure out the old domain name.

Phishing is a major way passwords are stolen and this project doesn't seem to do anything to protect against that. A browser extension (and mobile app), that checks the domain name before showing/filling the password could help.

The secret key field let me use `1234` as the key, although the color of the field was red. I think this should either prevent obviously weak passphrases or show a much more obvious warning if when one is used. Using a password found in a breach is also a bad idea (even it the password looks strong). You don't have a way to check HIBP, so users will be vulnerable if they make that mistake. It's too easy to make a critical mistake with the current design.

A bug: I filled out the form but forgot to enable JavaScript. The form posted my passphrase back to the server (https://pashword.app/?website=google.com&username=me&passphr...). I'd recommend changing the form so the submit button doesn't do anything when JS isn't loaded, otherwise the server will learn users passphrases. This is also a good place to remember that the user fully trusts that you wont steal their info (I'm not sure why anyone should trust that).

Also check out other similar projects, lots of discussion which likely applies here as well. I believe one of these supports uses a counter to support password rotation. You'd just need to remember the counter value for each site.

* LessPass - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12889807

Just take a look here: https://github.com/pashword/pashword/blob/main/pages/index.tsx

I'm looking for something close to https://pashword.app

Password managers can be a bit hard to manage, people don't even bother using them. There's https://pashword.app that solves this but not many people know about it.

And the best part is there are solutions already that do this: https://keepass.info/

Does it work on Android or iOS?

🔗 KeePass

When you're at a point where you're relying on a display name to make security-critical decisions, you've already lost.

Character substitutions like ķeepass or ƙeepass or keypass are at least possible to spot if you know the name of the product, but not the full URL.

But there are many ways to create lookalike domains that don't change the product name: https://keepass.org https://keepass.net https://keepass.info https://keepass.cx https://keepassxc.org https://keepass-info.net https://keepass-manager.com

Which of these is the correct one? (It's https://keepassxc.org of course, but just looking at the URL won't tell you that.)

The root cause is downloading software you see advertised on Google even though that does not in any way establish trustworthiness.

> People love to hate on passwords but the reality is that for many circumstances (threat models) they are the best compromise. You can make them more than strong enough (take 32+ bytes out of /dev/random and encode however you like, nobody will ever brute force that in this universe) and various passwords managers solve the problem of re-use (never reuse a password).

> And it comes with the benefit that you control how it is stored and can apply as much redundancy as you want to feel comfortable.

Honestly, I agree! I used KeePass back in the day (https://keepass.info/) but now use KeePassXC (https://keepassxc.org/) and it's really nice - I don't know any of my passwords because they're all randomly generated and are pretty secure. The only one I have to remember is my main password for decrypting the safe, which I also wrote down and entrusted to someone close to me due to its complexity.

It honestly works great, software to interact with the password safe is on every platform where I need it to be, in addition to it being super easy to reason about storage, because it's basically just a file - that I can then put on self-hosted Nextcloud, or another solution like that, or USB sticks or burn to CDs for all I care.

Maybe I should also migrate all of my TOTP stuff over to it and look into good Android apps at some point, then I wouldn't quite need Google Authenticator or FreeOTP anymore, either.

If you have used this combo at many sites (which is of course not recommended) then download one of the available free Password Managers like Keepass, Bitwarden, Lastpass or any others you can find with a Google Search

I also tried out KeePass for a little bit but prefer the BitWarden apps. The key thing here is don't store your passwords in the cloud as they are massive target for hackers.

There are various Keepass add-ons, but I prefer the standalone version.

Best KeePass Windows desktop client: KeePass

If though you can't stand the idea of your password vault on a 3rd party server then you can use an offline password manager like KeePass. Of course, you have to take responsibility for making and storing backups of your vault in case something happens to your device. Fortunately, Syncthing can make this pretty trivial.