Announcing FreeKey Alpha
Brandon Smith
announce the alpha release of FreeKey.
FreeKey is intended to be the simplest and best password management tool
anywhere, and it's free!
If you already have an Amazon S3 account, you can start using FreeKey in
just a few seconds. (If you don't, go to http://aws.amazon.com/s3/ and
sign up, it's free to sign up!) Just make a bucket for your FreeKey
files and then browse to http://reardencode.github.com/freekey .
FreeKey will ask for your Amazon AWS credentials, the name of the bucket
you created and a passphrase. None of this information will be stored
anywhere other than your computer and it will all be AES encrypted with
your passphrase (enhanced with pbkdf2).
Speaking of where FreeKey saves things, if you want to speed up load
time on slow connections, you can save the FreeKey HTML file from
http://reardencode.github.com/freekey/index.html and load it from your
local filesystem into your browser.
Once you enter your information, FreeKey will initialize and take you to
it's current simple UI. You can enter identifiers, usernames and
passwords here and FreeKey will save them to S3. At this point, it just
checks for changes ever 5 seconds and saves them. I'll improve that
soon.
Once you have a password in FreeKey, clicking on the user@identifier
will display the associated password, and autohide it 30 seconds later.
You can also hide it with the close link. Once I integrate a flash
clipboard tool we'll have the option of either showing or copying the
password.
The coolest thing about FreeKey is that if you enter the same AWS
credentials, bucket and password on another computer, phone or tablet,
all of your passwords will be right there. FreeKey tries to keep things
in sync every 30 seconds at worst, so you won't have to wait long for
your phone to get a password you entered on your computer. (This delay
may end up being increased for S3 cost reasons.)
The UI has many rough edges, let me know which ones really bother you
and I'll try to prioritize them :).
Now for some caveats:
FreeKey is brand new. I have no proof that it's super secure (it tries
to be) and I have no proof that it won't lose your data (it tries not
to).
FreeKey has only been tested in Google Chrome and HP WebOS 1.4.5 because
that's what I'm developing it in. It should work in most other browsers
though.
WebOS 1.4.5 has a bug that localStorage isn't persisted if all browser
cards close. I'll be using a cookie to store the credentials packet
soon. This means that on WebOS 1.4.5 any time you've closed all browser
cards it will make you reenter your AWS credentials. Totally
unacceptable.
FreeKey makes rather a lot of requests to S3, I've estimated a months
usage on a single client (running 24/7) at $.10/month.
If you navigate away from FreeKey before FreeKey saves your changes to
S3 (about 5 seconds after making a change) it's gone. Really really
gone.
Enjoy!
--Brandon
Brandon Smith
http://reardencode.github.com/freekey .
Changes include improved locking to avoid overwriting changes made by
different clients, code cleanups and UI improvements.
--Brandon