.
Find the site that you need a password for by entering it into the search field.
While searching, previously used sites will show up along with a usage counter.
The counter indicates the amount of times you've generated a password for that site.
The site's password is now displayed.
Tap it to copy the password. Once copied, you can switch to another application and paste it into a password field.
To change the password for this site, tap the edit icon .
Below the password you can set the password type. Some types create a password for you, others let you choose your own.
If the site complains when you try to set or update the password, try changing the password type.
To create another password for this site, you can increment the password counter 
.
This is useful, for example, when you've had to share the password with somebody else.
You use it by searching for the name of your site (you choose this yourself. For Twitter, you could use
twitter, twitter.com, or something else entirely as the name. Just remember how
you name your sites and try to be consistent). Tap the resulting password to copy it for pasting elsewhere
or type it manually on your computer.
The thought behind this application is to secure your online life by changing all of your passwords to passwords generated by this app.
The theory of password authentication is simple: To log in to a site, you share a secret word with the site that only you and the site know. Because nobody else knows your secret password, nobody else can log into your site.
It sounds good in theory. In practice, it's an absolute hell. These days, people have hundreds of accounts on sites all over the Internet. Does that mean we're all remembering hundreds of secret passwords? No, of course not. That would be impossible. If you're like most people, you remember one or two passwords, and use those for all your sites everywhere.
So, what?
, you might say.
Here's the problem: When you share a secret password with a site, and then share the same secret password
with another site, both sites can now use the password you gave them to log into your account on the
other site. Nothing is stopping them from trying to log into your GMail, Hotmail or Twitter
accounts using the same password that you used to register an account on their site. Even if you only give
your password to sites you trust, all it takes is for one of those sites to get hacked and loose their
passwords database. Those hackers now have all it takes to impersonate you. This is, in fact, so common,
that it's one of the main reasons people's accounts are getting hacked nowadays.
Some of you already try to remember unique-ish passwords for different sites. This causes problems too:
with so many passwords to remember, you easily forget passwords for sites you haven't used in a while. Or
you make up a simplification algorithm such as tacking your birth year onto the site name. This is really
not any more secure than using the same password for every site. And then there's those sites with
password policies
: suddenly your long password isn't good enough, because it begins with a number,
or because (god forbid) it's too long
. You now find yourself forced to create a strange variant
of your password that you'll have forgotten before the day is out.
This app solves the problem by letting you remember only a single password without requiring you to share the password with anyone else. Instead, the app creates secure passwords for use with whatever site or purpose you might need a password for.
That's why this application allows you to change the password type to Personal or Device
Private. These types let you enter a password for a site, and the app will encrypt and save it so
you it's there for future reference.
These types of stored
passwords don't have all the advantages that their generated counterparts have
(they can be lost if you loose your device and don't back it up), but when you can't change a site's
password to one generated by the app, this is as good as it gets.
Absolutely not! In fact, generated passwords aren't even stored on your device. No, not in the cloud either. They're not stored anywhere! What that basically means is, if you grab the iPhone of a colleague or friend and open this app on it with your own master password, it'll give you all your generated passwords (don't worry, it's perfectly safe). So, if you loose your iPhone or forget it, just open the app on your iPad, or borrow a friend's phone, and you're back in business. No backups or restores needed.
This also means that, unlike all those apps that store your passwords or send them off to be stored on the Internet, this app makes your passwords much safer from theft. If your device is stolen, the thieves can't get at your passwords. There's also no cloud service that can be mis-managed or hacked.
Correct. However, remember that usually you'll only need to use this app once for each site. After you log into a site once using the password generated by this app, your browser will probably ask you to remember the password for the future. Agree to that, and you won't need to bring up your phone again the next time you log in to the account.
A Mac version of this app is also in the works so that you can easily get to all of your passwords without needing to bring up your phone. More technically savvy users can already download a Bash script from the homepage that can generate these passwords for you on any POSIX system (such as your Mac).
For starters, make sure you've changed the passwords of all your sites you have accounts for to those generated by this app and make sure that you use this app when registering a new account somewhere, to determine the password to use for the account.
It's also important that you've chosen a long master password. Short master passwords, especially 4-digit PIN codes, are easily brute-forced by attackers. Using a 12-character master password provides sufficient entropy to protect against any modern-day attempt at brute-forcing, assuming the password is not based on easily determined facts (names, birth dates, etc.). If you're really paranoid, install a keyboard of a non-latin script (russian, chinese, ...) and create a master password using these characters or even a mix between scripts. Just don't forget it! :-)
If you go into Settings, on the bottom you'll find an entry for this application; tap it to
find some advanced settings for the app. Here, you can disable Remember my password. Doing
so will force the app to ask for your master password each time you open it. That way, when you show your
phone to somebody else after unlocking it, they can't go through your passwords.
Due to the nature of this app's algorithms and the decisions that were made to protect against brute-force attacks, it is simply infeasible to recover your master password. If you really can't remember it, your passwords are gone.
Where you go from here is, you change your master password (In Settings, flip Change my
password and start the app again), and for each of your accounts, you go through the password
recovery procedure (which will usually involve sending a message to your E-Mail account) and reset the
passwords of these accounts to passwords generated by your newly chosen master password. Just don't forget
it again! :-)
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. When the user requests a password be generated for a site, the application composes a string
consisting of the site name, the master password, and a password counter, delimited in that order by a dash
character, and hashes those UTF-8 bytes using the SHA-1 algorithm. The bytes
resulting from this hashing operation are called the keyBytes in the next steps.
Next, we need the password type that the user has chosen to use for the site. Password types determine the
cipher
that will be used to encrypt keyBytes into a readable password. For
instance, the standard password type Long Password
activates one of three pre-set ciphers:
CvcvCvcvnoCvcv, CvcvnoCvcvCvcv or CvcvCvcvCvcvno. Which of those
will be used, depends on the first of the keyBytes. Take the byte value modulo the amount of
pre-set ciphers (in this case, three), and the result tells you which of the three ciphers to use.
Now that we know what cipher to use for building our final password, all that's left is to iterate the
cipher, and produce a character of password output for each step. When you iterate the cipher, every
character in the cipher represents a set of possible output characters. For instance, a C
character in the cipher indicates that we need to choose a capital consonant character. An o
character in the cipher indicates that we need to choose an other
(symbol) character. Exactly which
character to choose in that set for the password output depends on the next byte from keyBytes.
Like before, take the next unused keyByte's byte value modulo the amount of characters in the
set of possible output characters for the cipher iteration and use the result to choose the output
character. Repeat until you've iterated the whole cipher.
The result is a password whose format is dictated by the password type's ciphers and whose exact value is filled in by feeding the algorithm some bytes from a hash operation on the user's givens.
Contact me directly for enterprise inquiries. I can provide branded clients and enterprise distribution if your company is interested in deploying this solution internally.