Easy Passwords is now PfP: Pain-free Passwords

With the important 2.0 milestone I decided to give my Easy Passwords project a more meaningful name. So now it is called PfP: Pain-free Passwords and even has its own website. And that’s the only thing most people will notice, because the most important changes in this release are well-hidden: the crypto powering the extension got an important upgrade. First of all, the PBKDF2 algorithm for generating passwords was dumped in favor of scrypt which is more resistant to brute-force attacks. Also, all metadata written by PfP as well as backups are encrypted now, so that they won’t even leak information about the websites used. Both changes required much consideration and took a while to implement, but now I am way more confident about the crypto than I was back when Easy Passwords 1.0 was released. Finally, there is now an online version compiled from the same source code as the extensions and having mostly the same functionality (yes, usability isn’t really great yet, the user interface wasn’t meant for this use case).

Now that the hard stuff is out of the way, what’s next? The plan for the next release is publishing PfP for Microsoft Edge (it’s working already but I need to figure out the packaging), adding sync functionality (all encrypted just like the backups, so that in theory any service where you can upload files could be used) and importing backups created with a different master password (important as a migration path when you change your master password). After that I want to look into creating an Android client as well as a Node-based command line interface. These new clients had to be pushed back because they are most useful with sync functionality available.

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