Encrypted plaintext password store
Project description
sala lets you store passwords and other bits of sensitive plain-text information to encrypted files on a directory hierarchy. The information is protected by GnuPG’s symmetrical encryption.
Copyright (C) 2011 Petri Lehtinen. sala is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the MIT license. See the file LICENSE distributed with the source code for details.
Basic usage
Passwords are stored in a directory hierarchy, each file containing one secret, like this:
/path/to/passwords |-- example-service.com | |-- +webmail | | |-- @myuser | | `-- @otheruser | `-- +adminpanel | `-- @admin `-- my-linux-box |-- @myuser `-- @root
I use a convention of naming directories after services and using @username as the file name. If a service has groups, categories, subservices, etc., I use subdirectories whose names are prefixed with +. Of course, you can come up with your own scheme, for example if you want to hide the usernames, too.
To create a new password store, first create an empty directory, change into it, and invoke:
$ sala init
This command asks for the master passphrase you want to use for the store. It then initializes the password store by creating a long random key and encrypting it with the master passphrase.
Create a new password for service/@myuser:
$ sala set service/@myuser
This command first asks you for the master passphrase, and then the secret that should be stored to the file service/@myuser. The intermediate directory service is created automatically.
To read the secret you just stored, invoke:
$ sala get service/@myuser
This command asks again for the master passphrase, and outputs the secret.
All the files are just normal files, so you can safely remove or rename files if you want to.
The above commands can also be used on multiple files at once:
sala set service2/@myuser service3/@otheruser sala get service2/@myuser service3/@otheruser
If no command is specified, sala assumes get if the first file exists and set otherwise. That is, the command:
sala foo/@bar
reads the secret foo/@bar if the file exists, and creates a new secret otherwise. Note that this may not work as you expect for multiple files, as the existence of the first file determines whether to read or to write.
Configuration
sala can be configured with an INI-style configuration file. sala tries to read the configuration from ~/.sala.conf and from sala.conf in the top directory of the password store. Neither of the files are required. If a configuration setting is specified in both files, the the latter takes precedence.
Here’s the default configuration:
# All configuration settings are in the [sala] section. [sala] # The cipher to use with GnuPG's symmetrical encryption. # Run "gpg --version" to list supported ciphers. cipher = AES256 # Master key length, in bytes key-length = 64 # A shell command to run to generate password suggestions password-generator = pwgen -nc 12 10
Changing cipher only affects secrets that are set after the configuration setting is changed, i.e. the old secrets will not automatically be re-encrypted.
Only sala init uses the key-length option. If you want the master key to be of a different size, make sure the configuration file exists before you run sala init.
The password-generator option is run through the shell to generate password suggestions. If the command fails (is not found or exits with non-zero exit status), its output is ignored. Othewise, the output should consist of one or more words separated with whitespace (space, tab, newline, etc.). These words are presented to the user as password suggestions by sala set.
Under the hood
sala uses GnuPG’s symmetric encryption. All encrypted files are in the GnuPG plain text (armor) format.
When the password store is initialized, a very long, truly random key is generated and stored to the file .salakey. Only this “master key” is encrypted with your master passphrase. All the other files in the store are encrypted with the master key.
Installation
Install sala by invoking:
pip install sala
To install from source, invoke:
python setup.py install
Requirements:
Python 2.6 or newer. Currently, 3.x is not supported.
GnuPGInterface for Python
Suggested packages:
pwgen: If found, used to suggest password to the user by default
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