A new take on autogenerated passwords

Today’s XKCD got me thinking about the strength of my own passwords again. Some time ago, XKCD already hit on the topic of password reuse.

A major argument for reusing passwords is that one can’t remember dozens of passwords for all services one uses. The typical counter-argument then is that one can use a password storage, be it a local application like KWallet or an online service. Such services allow you to protect multiple different passwords with one master password, which is the only one which you have to remember.

I am personally a user of KWallet, and must agree that it’s a great relief to have a backup for this crucial data available anytime. (Currently, KWallet stores over 200 passwords on my notebook alone, and there are probably unmerged passwords over at my desktop.)

But alas, both kinds of password storage solutions have a big problem: KWallet and friends are useless when you don’t have the wallet file around on the computer which you are currently using, you’re stuck. If the only computer carrying the wallet file gets broken, you’re totally lost. On the other hand, online storage solutions require a big deal of trust towards the provider running the service. As we saw earlier this year with LastPass, this trust is in general not justified.

So what can be done? I just had an idea which I did not see before anywhere. (Might be that I did not look closely enough. Please tell me if this idea has already existed before.)

If we don’t want to store passwords (because that requires both the availability of the storage and trust with a provider of this available storage), we need to generate them based on an algorithm. In other words,

#!/usr/bin/env python2

import base64, getpass, hashlib, subprocess, sys

def doHash(x):
    return base64.b64encode(hashlib.sha512(x).digest())

def sendToXClipboard(x):
    subprocess.Popen(["xsel", "-i"], stdin=subprocess.PIPE).stdin.write(x)

try:
    site = sys.argv[1]
except IndexError:
    sys.stderr.write("Usage: %s [domain]\n" % sys.argv[0])
else:
    masterPassword = getpass.getpass("Password: ")
    sitePassword = doHash(doHash(site) + doHash(masterPassword)) # variant 1
    sitePassword = doHash(site + masterPassword)                 # variant 2
    sendToXClipboard(sitePassword)

This Python script reads the name of a website, and prompts for a master password. It then combines both using a considered-secure hashing algorithm (SHA-512 in this case), and sends the Base64-encoded result of that to the X clipboard (so the password won’t be displayed on screen). Base64 is the best compromise between printability and string size.

The code shows two incompatible variants of obtaining the sitePassword. I won’t debate over which is better. The extra hashes in variant 1 are, strictly speaking, security by obscurity, as they don’t help when the attacker knows the algorithm. However, that’s not the main security feature. As far as I can see, this algorithm relies solely on the strength of the SHA-512 algorithm, which is (as of August 11, 2011) considered secure, and (if the attacker is brute-forcing) on the strength of your master password. So don’t choose “correcthorsebatterystaple”. 😀