<aclass="next"href="#about"onClick="navigateTo($(this).attr('href').substring(1));">What is this thing?</a>
<divclass="sidebox">
<divclass="clip">
<imgsrc="img/MasterPassword_1.png"/>
</div>
</div>
<h1>Stop worrying about <em>passwords</em></h1>
<h2>Memorising passwords or even saving them in our browser, an application or the cloud just isn't good enough.</h2>
<p>Master Password is a solution that <strong>voids the need to <em>keep</em> your passwords anywhere</strong>. Not in your head, not on your computer and not in the cloud. Nothing to store means nothing to loose. At the same time it makes sure that your accounts are adequately protected with <em>exclusive</em> passwords.</p>
<p>With Master Password, you <strong>remember <em>one</em> secure password</strong> and use that with the application to <strong>generate <em>any</em> password you might need</strong>. You could even generate PIN codes with it, if you wanted. Today, it's time to <em>stop worrying</em> about passwords and get on with what we need to get done.</p>
Passwords are confidential information between you and a site. They should never be shared with anyone else, definitely not other sites. Yet that's exactly what happens with most of us: Hundereds of online accounts to manage and authenticate, <strong>we can't help but reuse one, two or five passwords that we can remember</strong>. Maybe we keep a paper stuck to our monitor with a list of passwords on them, because we realize the truth:
<blockquote>It is impossible to remember a secure password for each of our accounts and still keep those passwords both <em>exclusive</em> and <em>confidential</em>.</blockquote>
Sites that realize that passwords aren't the end-all of authentication usually implement some sort of alternative authentication mechanism: <em>OpenID, SAML, some form of mobile authentication, secure tokens, etc</em>.<br/>
The problem here is that these solutions only work for the select few sites that have chosen to implement them; and then you, the user, are stuck with whatever mechanism the site has chosen for you.
To solve the problem for other sites, there are <em>programs that remember our passwords for us</em>.<br/>
The problem with these is that they do not actually help us with setting exclusive and confidential passwords for our accounts. They just offload the work of remembering passwords, and at a great expense: <strong>If you loose your data, you loose your online identity and are locked out of everything</strong>.
In the end, <em>what we really want</em> is a way of dealing with passwords in an exclusive and confidential way <em>without having to remember</em> them, and <em>without running the risk of losing our online identity</em> to fraudsters.
Master Password does exactly this. You remember a single master password. Make it a long and secure one. Master Password uses this password along with the name of the site that you want to log into and generates a secure but unique password for that site. What's more, it doesn't store this information anywhere. If you loose your phone, the thieves can get none the wiser from it. You kick yourself for losing your phone, pick up any other phone, start the application, enter your master password, and instantly have access to all your passwords again. No sync, no backups, no hassle.
</p>
<ul>
<li>Built with the highest security considerations in mind.</li>
<li>Designed with beauty, elegance, simplicity and usability in mind.</li>
<li>Different types of passwords can be generated to curb sites with strange password policies.</li>
<li>A password counter lets you generate a new password for a site in case it gets compromised.</li>
<li>Master password can be either:
<ul>
<li>Stored securely on the device (so you don't need to enter it anymore).</li>
<li>Not stored but remembered between sessions (so you only enter it once after powering on).</li>
<li>Not stored or remembered and required for every usage of the application (safest).</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>For those cases where you cannot change your account's password, the application will encrypt passwords with your master password and store them securely (as explained, stored passwords can get lost).</li>
<li>Integrates with iCloud to synchronize and back up your site history and stored passwords.</li>
Anyone interested in joining the beta is invited to <ahref="http://bit.ly/vNN5Zi">join the Lyndir TestFlight team</a>. Every so often new pending testers are admitted to the Master Password beta testers team.
</p>
<p>
Participation in the beta is free of charge, but does come with the expectation that you will contribute. Comment constructively, report issues and propose improvements.
Post-beta, Master Password is expected to sell for somewhere around 10 USD. The most helpful testers will receive the final version (and all future updates) free of charge.
<aclass="previous"href="#about"onClick="navigateTo($(this).attr('href').substring(1));">What is this thing?</a>
<aclass="next"href="https://github.com/Lyndir/MasterPassword">View the code</a>
<h1>So how does it work?</h1>
<p>
The theory behind Master Password is simple. The user remembers a single, secure password. The user only ever uses that password to log into the Master Password application. This master password is then used as a seed to generate a different password based on the name of the site to generate a password for.
</p>
<p>
The result is that each master password generates its own unique sequence of passwords for any site name. Since the only input data is the master password and the site name (along with a password counter, see below), there is no need for any kind of storage to recreate a site's password. All that's needed is the correct master password and the correct algorithm implementation. What that does for you is make it almost impossible to loose your passwords. It also makes it nearly impossible for hackers to steal your online identity.
</p>
<h1>The algorithm</h1>
<p>
Alright, let's describe the process in detail. This part will likely make sense to you only if you're well versed in computer security jargon. If you're the kind of person who likes to know how the clock ticks before deciding that it can be trusted to keep ticking, read on.
The user chooses a single master password, preferably sufficiently long to harden against brute-force attacks. Before usage, a <code>masterKey</code> is derived from this master password using the <ahref="http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html">scrypt key derivation function</a>. This makes it impossibly expensive and time-consuming to attempt brute-forcing a properly sized master password.
When the user requests a password be generated for a site, the application composes a byte string consisting of the site name, the master key, and a password counter, delimited in that order by a dash character (characters are UTF-8 encoded, numbers in 32-bit network byte order), and hashes it using the <code>SHA-1</code> algorithm. The result is called the <code>cipherKey</code>.
</p>
<code><pre>
cipherKey = sha1( site name "-" masterKey "-" password counter )
Next up is to merge this key with the password type that the user has chosen to use for the site. Password types determine the <q>cipher</q> that will be used to encrypt <code>cipherKey</code> bytes into a readable password. For instance, the standard password type <q>Long Password</q> activates one of three pre-set ciphers: <code>CvcvCvcvnoCvcv</code>, <code>CvcvnoCvcvCvcv</code> or <code>CvcvCvcvCvcvno</code>. Which of those will be used, depends on the first byte of the <code>cipherKey</code>. Take the byte value modulo the amount of pre-set ciphers (in this case, three), and the result tells you which of the pre-set ciphers to use.
