I love Passbolt

I have to say I’m pretty impressed with Passbolt (a PHP password manager), mainly because it’s so braindead simple. Rather than implement some complex protection scheme on the server, it just transfers the responsibility to the client. The client is the only one who knows the Private Key and if somebody is in a group, then the secret is simply stored encrypted once for every member of the group, with each copy being encrypted with the group member’s public key.

That way whoever copies the data from the server has no way of getting to the private key (maybe by manipulating the web interface, but I’m actually not so sure about that since the web interface actually does the majority of its work through an extension… I’m not sure if the web interface has direct access to the private key).

This offers some interesting possibilities. Namely that you can export the secrets table from the Passbolt MySQL database and it will still be secure as well as readable by each member of a group, because there will be a separate entry for each user.

Decryption is very straight forward since Passbolt itself uses OpenPGP. Just grab a copy, put it in a script and all you have to do is

let privateKeyArmored=document.getElementById("privateKey").value;
let passphrase=document.getElementById("password").value;
let message=document.getElementById("encryptedMessage").value;
let privateKey = await openpgp.decryptKey({privateKey: await openpgp.readKey({ armoredKey: privateKeyArmored }) ,passphrase });
let {data:decrypted} = await openpgp.decrypt({message: await openpgp.readMessage({ armoredMessage:message}),decryptionKeys: privateKey});
document.getElementById("decryptedMessage").value=(decrypted);

And voilĂ  your secret is decrypted. That way you can easily store a safe offline copy that you can decrypt on demand.

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