Introduction

Keybox is a secure store for passwords, keys, and other secrets.

There is a Python API (import keybox), a runnable package (python3 -m keybox) and a wrapper script (keybox, created by setuptools).

Keybox is completely offline. All secrets stay safely in a local file. Nothing is sent anywhere, unless you explicitly set up network synchronization using some other tool.

Features:

• Data encrypted using strong encryption (PyNaCl)

• Inside encrypted envelope, it’s a simple tab-delimited file format

• Shell-like text user interface

Security:

• Master password is saved in memory for as long as the program runs.

• Neither the password nor decrypted data are written to the disk (unless explicitly exported).

Portability:

• The script should run on any system with Python3 installed (including Windows).

• Requires no installation. You can bring your keybox with you anywhere.

• Can be contained in a single Python file (see Static Distribution below)

Dependencies:

• Python 3.7 or later

• PyNaCl, prompt_toolkit, blessed, pyperclip

Installation

Install Python package, together with the keybox wrapper script, from PyPI:

pip3 install keybox

That’s it. PIP should pull in the required dependencies.

python3 setup.py install

python3 -m keybox

Getting Started

Run the program, choose a master password. A new keybox file will be created.

You are now in the shell. The basic workflow uses the following commands:

• add some passwords

• list the records

• select a record

• print the password

• quit

Type help for a list of all commands, help <cmd> for description of each command and its parameters.

Config file

The default config file path is ~/.keybox/keybox.conf. It can be used to point to a different location for the keybox file:

[keybox]
path = ~/vcs/keybox/keybox.safe

Without the config file, the default keybox path is ~/.keybox/keybox.safe.

Password Generator

A bundled password generator can be called from command line (keybox pwgen) or internally from the shell. In the shell, use <tab> when asked for a password (in the add/modify commands) to generate some random passwords.

Pwgen is based on the system word list that is usually found in /usr/share/dict/words. By default, it generates a password from two concatenated words, altered by adding two uppercase letters and one digit somewhere inside the password.

This gives around 50 bits of entropy on my system (Password strength).

Static Distribution

Call make zipapp to create a zipapp file containing all sources. The zipapp file is written to build directory and is directly executable by Python.

The Makefile target uses zipapp module which is available since Python 3.5.

Development

Build docs:

make -C docs html

Run tests:

make test

Show test code coverage:

make htmlcov

Build and check package:

make build
make check

The Project Name

There might be some confusion between this Keybox project and GnuPG project, which has something called “a keybox file (.kbx)” and a tool to handle it, kbxutil.

This Keybox is completely unrelated to the GnuPG one.