pwclip 0.4.17

gui to temporarily save passwords to system-clipboard

What pwclip is

pwclip is a password management tool. It’s main target is having fast and comfortable access to passwords by storing them for a variable time in the systems clipboard (copy/paste) buffer.

It basically 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).

The second operating mode does currently only work (as so far tested) on Linux due to lack of cmdline handling of gpg4win (which i am not sure about and will go into as soon as i find the time and motivation for that). 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. See “YAML-Format” section for details.

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. As you may see there is an optional commet which is used as text notification displayed on the screen if set. Therefor python3’s gi notify2 is used which is another reason for discontinuing python2 support.

I highly encourage you to bind pwclip to a shortcut within your X-Environment to have access to your stored passwords from within any program. For example i like binding it to Super-Middle-Mouse-Button for the pwclip default mode and Strg-Shift-Middle-Mouse-Button for the yubico mode. On Windows-Systems you need to create a link for it somewhere. When editing that link you may set a keyboard shortcut (could not find a nicer solution by now). The target for that link then whould be “%PYTHONINSTALLDIR%\scripts\pwclip.exe”.

Last but not least i want to point something out: I’ve been trying my best to keep the passwords secure from unwanted access BUT there is !NO GUARANTEE! that the passwords handled with during runtime are safe from other users access, especially root access on linux systems (help on that is very welcome). Please be aware of that.

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”. Here should be all infos needed for that:

• https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/xsel/

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

• http://libusb.info/

If you are on a Debian-Like systems, presuming you have my apt repository deb.janeiskla.de/ubuntu in your sources list, install like:

$ apt-get install pwclip

Installing via pip3

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

• pip3 install pwclip

and installing the dependencies (not managed by pip) manually.

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:

GPG-Mode

pwclip

If there is an environment variable called GPGKEYS it will use those keys to encrypt on changes to the password file. To list the password file you may use the list switch followed by optional search pattern like:

pwclip -l

or

pwclip -l $PATTERN

as you can see the yaml format tends to be used for multiple user names to better manage large lists. By default the current users entrys will be listed only. To have them all listed (or searched for by the above pattern example) use:

pwclip -A -l $PATTERN

To show even passwords in clear text (strongly unrecommanded for obvious reasons) you may use:

pwclip -l -s

Most of the above may be combined.

Yubikey-Mode

pwclip -y

The YKSERIAL environment variable is used if found to select the yubikey to use if more than one key is connected. Otherwise the first one found is chosen. Likewise it also accepts an option:

pwclip -y $YKSERIAL

Both-Modes

To have it wait for a specific time like 5 seconds (bevore resetting the paste buffer to the previously copied value) the PWCLIPTIME environment variable is used or also the command accepts that as input:

pwclip 5

The timer option can only be privided last on cmdline.

Credits

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

• Pyperclip for they excellent Windows & OSX clipboard code

• 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]>

Changelog

0.4.17 (current)

Released 2017-07-23

• committed the changes for the last release :P

• changelog file updated

0.4.16

Released: 2017-07-23

• fixed dependency to psutil

• removed printing of debugging output & fixed some syntax and indentation errors

• [W] environment error fixed (USER => USERNAME)

• [W] gi import error fixed (no xnotify on windows)

0.4.15

Released: 2017-07-21

• readded last 3 changelog messages wich where mistakenly removed completley from the README.rst file

• keeping the last 3 changelog messages in the README.rst file while the complete changelog is moved to a seperate CHANGELOG.rst file

Documentation

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