pwclip 0.4.1

gui to temporarily save passwords to clipboard (paste-buffer)

What is pwclip?

pwclip has two operating modes. One is for operating on yubikeys to generate uniq responses which might be used as passwords while they can be generated by that exact yubikey only. The first yubikey found on the system and the first slot, configured with (HMAC-SHA1) challenge-response, will be used. For that function Windows is supported (see “Install” section). For now python2.7 is still also supported but might be discontinued. Therefor it should be sufficient to just apply the installation for python2 likewise.

To catch user input python’s Tk (tkinter) library is used to create a simple password input window. The appropriate response is saved for only 3 seconds by default to not have it exposed as soon as it’s used. The utility also supports the input of any integer which is then used as timer. Otherwise the environment is searched for PWCLIPTIME and uses the value of that environment variable as timer. The timer is used as time in which the received password stays in the paste buffer bevore its replaced by the previously copied value.

The second operating mode does currently only works (as so far tested) on Linux due to lack of cmdline handling of gpg4win. It can be used to create a ~/.pwdcrypt file which is gpg encrypted text using either the value of GPGKEYS as gpg recipients if found in environment otherwise every key within the users keyring will be used. For password-list managing there is a simple “import” function. On startup it lookes for a ~/.pwd.yaml file and if found merged with the already known passwords from the ~/.passcrypt if there is one. All entrys in ~/.passcrypt will be overridden by the entrys from the ~/.pwd.yaml file. As soon as it has been merged the ~/.pwd.yaml file will be deleted.

The accepted yaml format:

---

realsystemuser:

- somename:

- Som3(rypt!cPass

- Some optional info to display as popup notification

- othername:

- Som3other(rypt!cPass

Installation

pwclip requires the “xsel” package on Debian-Like Systems to have access to copy/paste buffers. On Windows Systems the libusb package must be integrated to python3 as “USB-Backend”.

• https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/xsel/

• https://sourceforge.net/projects/libusb/

• http://libusb.info/

If you are on a Debian-Like system the installation of the dependencies should work like the following (on root terminal):

$ apt-get install xsel gnupg2

Installing via pip3

You can install this package from the Python Package Index (pyPI) by running:

• pip3 install pwclip

Installing from a source distribution archive

To install this package from a source distribution archive, do the following:

1. Extract all the files in the distribution archive to some directory on your system.

2. In that directory, run: python setup.py install

Usage

Although is was planed as GUI-Program it’s also possible to be executed from terminals. For Windows, Linux and OSX there is an appropriate executable packed which might be executed like the following examples will show:

Yubikey-Mode

pwclip

The PWCLIPTIME environment variable is used if found so the following command does pretty much the same:

pwclip $PWCLIPTIME

To have it wait for a specific time like 5 seconds (bevore resetting the paste buffer to the previously copied value) use the following command:

pwclip 5

GPG-Mode

pwclip -c

Alike in yubikey-mode the PWCLIPTIME variable is used as timer. If there is an environment variable called GPGKEYS it will use those keys to encrypt on changes to the password file

Credits

• Python3 developers & the whole community (farmost those @stackoverflow.com)

• Yubico (cheap & solid HW-Security-Modules) & python-yubico developers

• GNU Privacy Guard (basic kryptography) & python-gnupg developers

• SonicLux for telling me that a final version cannot and must not be 0.3.3 :D

I hope that this might be somewhat of help or at least be inspiring for own ideas. You’re alway welcome to leave me a message for requests, review or feature/bugrequests: <[e-mail]>

Change log

0.4.1 (current)

Commit: 2016-10-27

• python2 support is now discontinued (dependency differences are nasty)

• implemented command line argument parsing including help

• stylistic updates regarding cmdline output and passclip management

• fixed another bunch of bugs around the GUI for user input

• fixed empty gpg-passphrase usage

• fixed user input which was repeatedly asking for input on escape/cancle

• fixed error if no ~/.passcrypt file was found

• fixed some issues with adding/changing/deleting passwords from passcrypt

• fixed bugs caused by merging build environment development branch

0.4.0

Released: 2016-10-26

• implemented PIN/Passphrase input gui for GPG decryption

• fixed many I/O encryption/decryption on-the-fly issues

• merged monolithic code into smaller files for better modularity/compliance

• some stylistic updates/fixes

0.3.3

Released: 2016-10-22

• final release of pwclip with new function and documentation

0.2.6 - 0.3.2

Released: 2016-10-22

• minor documentation fixes (playing around with rst formatting)

0.2.5

Released: 2016-10-22

• seperated the code into submodules within lib/ to be more compliant to my usual environment

• added complete new en/decryption mode via python3-gnupg - now it’s capable of selecting gpg-keys by GPGKEYS environment variable to en/decrypt ~/.passcrypt

• documentation updated and cleanup on typo/irrelevant text

• FIXED: issue where the gpg-agent isn’t able decrypt without passphrase/pin and clould not ask for it

Documentation

http://packages.python.org/pwclip/