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Ask HN: File-based password manager for Linux
7 points by rgppq112 2512 days ago
There are many password managers out there that keep reinventing obscure UIs and obscure file formats. Can we instead just say that:

- A username:password entry with all extra fields (such the the site url), is stored as a text file, encrypted with AES. - The filename is the short description of the creds and that filename is also encrypted. - These files can be put into folders that denote groups.

If everything was decrypted, it would look like this:

/passwords /banks /mybank1 username:foobar password:qwerty url:foobar.com /mybank2 ...

However on the disk it's stored in the encrypted form:

/passwords /21ef..990d 2899..8827 /0012..2718 7728..8291

On top of that we need some tool that lets you go to bash, cd to that folder, enter the password in a secure way and then it would let you use "nano" to open any of those text files.

$ cd ~/pass $ passtool > master password: qwerty $ nano banks/mybank1

The killer feature is that you can use "rsync" without decrypting anything: you can rsync creds between backup harddrives, usb sticks and so on. If you accidentally added a few creds here and there and not sure which copy is the most up to date - rsync will let you fix it and you won't need to type that 100 chars master password.

What do you think?

P.S. HN's formatting is just wow. Add "white-space: pre-wrap" to CSS, guys. It's 2019.

1 comments

This sounds very similar to pass [1]. Are you looking for a password manager that fills these needs, or looking to develop what you have described?

- [1] https://www.passwordstore.org/

I'd rather use an existing tool.