Sadly, so far, there is even not the beginning of a replacement solution. Passwords will be there for long, so we would better use them accordingly.

Yes, I am aware of many on-line services like FisrtPass, KeePass, 1stPassword, etc. However, I don’t feel comfortable with having all my password somewhere on-line, even if they claim – and I believe they are sincere, that they use strong encryption and can’t access to it.

Instead, I use a combination of the Firefox password manager and the Pwgen add-on. I use this add-on to quickly and conveniently generate a random password when I subscribe to a web service. When Firefox prompts for it, I just choose to remember the password automatically. SSO quick and dirty.

For the other passwords that I can’t and don’t need to memorize, I store them in a local encrypted file.

To edit the file, I simply use Vim with this nice GPG plugin:

• copy gpg.vim to /home/$user/.vim/plugin
• if not done yet, generate you GPG key :

   $ gpg --gen-key

• Encrypt your password file and erase it:

  $ gpg --encrypt --recipient 'your name' passwords
  $ rm passwords

• Now, it’s done. Just edit password.gpg to decrypt and access to your passwords (you will be prompted for your passphrase):

  $ vim passwords.gpg

If you don’t like the overhead of GPG, a more straightforward solution is to use the OpenSSL extension :

• Copy the openssl.vim file to /home/$user/.vim/plugin as well.

• Now, to encrypt to file to, say, AES (note the .aes file extension which makes sense for the plugin):

  $ openssl aes-256-cbc -in passwords -out passwords.aes

• Decryption will occur as soon as you edit the file with Vim:

  $ vim passwords.aes

I believe that, if not perfect, it is pretty secure. I mean not more, not less than your system is. Anyway I don’t have any need for an on-line manager. And you, how do you manage your passwords? Let us know about your tips.

Wait, what ? Javascript ? Yes, as the author explains, modern Javascript engines are not so slow anymore, and in addition HTML 5 brings a new “feature” with webworkers which allow the browser to run Javascript in the background (e.g without waiting on the page executing the script).

Combine it with several computers connecting to the same page executing a password cracking script and you get easily quite a powerful distributed password cracker.

Visit this page for more details.

“This is an OpenID Server, Nothing to See Here… Move Along”

I could not find what as wrong, as all prerequisites were fulfilled, until I find this nice post. The patch there works very well, thanks to the author (it is a shame that it wasn’t yet included in the trunk).

This and the lack of active open-source development around OpenID seems to show that it is not really popular. It is a shame because it is a pretty good solution against the multiplication of passwords. I wouldn’t want to use OpenID for my bank account access, but it is just right for many sites, forums, etc. Unfortunately, no many sites are yet OpenID enabled and the choice when you want to become your own provider is very limited (most of projects listed in the official wiki are dead, with no update for the last 2 years).

There are a lot of changes, starting with cosmetics, but the biggest one is the support of multiprocessing.

It is now able to process several routers at the same time, so using it on a large list of machines results in a big speed up.

A downside is that it now requires at least Python 2.6, as multiprocessing started to be supported with this version only. Most Linux distributions now include Python 2.6, but still not all. Anyway it will be more and more the case. If you can’t uprade your distribution, you can stick with 0.60 which still do most of the work fine.

It is also now able to fetch a configuration file remotly, but it requires more testing before I feel confident in the way it works.

The complete changelog :

2009-12-20  (0.71) Jean-Christophe Baptiste ;

* ciscoclass.py : handle correctly the cisco pager — More — so that “show run” mode should work even with large config files
* sshclass.py : allow to override terminal size system settings (make use of the cisco pager to avoid filling the buffer)

2009-11-16  (0.70) Jean-Christophe Baptiste (private release)

* implement multiprocessing
* improve code documentation
* clean up UI
* reduce useless logging
* netios.py : bug : missing startTime parameter in f_skip_error and f_command functions

I cross my fingers so that there are not too many bugs, but if so, please don’t forget to report it to me.

Check there (tools page) for more details and a download link.

Netios is a little tool aimed to help network administrators to administrate a large number of Cisco network devices.
Providing it with a list of equipments, it connects within SSH to remotly apply IOS commands.

It can automatically :

• retrieve and export in a CSV file the list of local users
• update the local user, the enable password
• change NTP settings
• execute a file of customed IOS commands
• retrieve configuration files

It can read the targets from the command line or from a text file.

Its primary goal is to improve the security by making it easier to renew regularly the local password of these equipments, but it can do more convenient things (and I will continue to work to add more of them).

Check there (tools page) for more details and a download link.