Polonium is a stateless password manager that creates & retrieves passwords without storing them in a database. The advantages to this approach;
- your database can't be stolen
- you can get your passwords anywhere you can get polonium.
Polonium only requires you to remember one master password, from which it derives subordinate passwords for your various service logins. Even if these subordinate passwords are compromised the attacker cannot compromise your master password.
polonium get githubsudo snapcraft build --use-lxd
Note that most of the logic in this program is performed by https://github.com/rgrannell1/polonium-lib.
To install polonium quickly, use:
sudo snap install poloniumRun the following commands through Powershell:
git clone https://github.com/rgrannell1/polonium.git
cd polonium
npm install -gsrc/
app/
fetch-master-password.js reads the master password interactively.
polonium.js the core application.
report.js displays an output password.
cli/
cli.js the cli implementation.
commons/
constants.js a file full of constants.
Polonium is a shallow wrapper around node.js's implementation of Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2 (PBKDF2); all polonium adds is a method of gathering command-line arguments and converting the derived keys to base62.
For more information on PBKDF2 see the following resources:
You must not use your master password anywhere it might be compromised; if your master password is known to an attacker, all polonium-derived passwords can also be cracked easily.
A good, XKCD-approved method of making a master password is to take you favourite large dictionary - for example the Oxford English Dictionary - and choose five or more random words as your password.
Taking the OED as an example, choosing five of its 170,000 words gets you 86 bits of entropy. If the attacker does not know your choice of dictionary your security depends on the length of your password.
Modern GPU-based cracking can make billions of attempts a day at password cracking, so even passwords made by secure hashing algorithms can be cracked quickly. Polonium, or more accurately PBKDF2, uses key-stretching to slow down brute force attacks.
High iteration counts waste the attacker's time and raises their electric bill, so polonium spitefully defaults to a costly 1,000,000 iterations.
If this is too hard on your battery / device, set poloniums iterations to a number preferably above 200,000 iterations.
Polonium passwords are base62-encoded. Although base16 and base64 are more common, Base62 (alphanumeric) passwords are generally permitted by online services and are entropy-dense compared to base16 passwords. Even short base62 passwords exceed the recommended minimum of 80-bits of entropy per password.
Polonium passwords only have application specific salts, not user-specific salts. Two users that share a salt ('facebook') and master password ('password123') will share the same output password. For this and many other reasons, use a unique master password.
- Currently untested.
ENHANCEMENTS
- Added group option to group passwords into discreet groups of characters.
ENHANCEMENTS:
- Updated packages
ENHANCEMENTS:
- Added slightly more documentation about the default SHA hash
- Added a
--lineoption, which prints each character of a password along with it's indices
PACKAGE-INTERNALS:
- Remove Makefile & switched to NPM scripts
- Add
baseto snap package
ENHANCMENTS:
- Ported more code to `use ES6
- Reduces poor code factoring and fixed poor folder `structure.
- Added short options for length and rounds `arguments.
- Removed (node-gyp depending) bignum package, refactoring to use a JS-only `package.
ENHANCMENTS:
- Ported some code to use ES6 features.
- Updated package structure.
- Code now uses strict-mode.
- Minor updates to documentation.
- Added explicit npm version dependencies.
- Added (docker) installation testing.
- Added recommeded fields to package.json
- Fixed (accidental?) use of global variables.
ENHANCMENTS:
- Made it much easier to install polonium on Ubuntu.
PACKAGE-INTERNALS:
- Seperated polonium's main function from it's docopt interface, to help transition to using this package as a dependency for polonium-gui.
- Started adding unit tests for polonium.
ENHANCMENTS:
- Officially declared support for Windows, though no actual code changes were required.
DOCUMENTATION:
- Added installation instructions for Windows, not currently tested.
BUG-FIXES:
- Added a newline missing from the error message displayed when the password prompt is exited.
BUG-FIXES:
- Fixed a long-outstanding security issue in Polonium. Approximately 11% of salt-password pairs could not be correctly coerced to a base62 string for output. This update is not back compatible; you must reset all polonium passwords.
The initial release.
The MIT License
Copyright (c) 2020 Róisín Grannell
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.