pstore :: Python Protected Password Store
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Do you want to store and share passwords? With pstore you store the encrypted passwords on a remote server. All encryption is done locally by the command line interface, so the server never sees your unencrypted passwords.
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pstore allows you to store and retrieve passwords and other sensitive data in a safe manner. The permission system allows you to share these secrets with others on the same pstore server.
For passwords and other secret items, you encrypt them on the client side automatically with the pstore client. This way the pstore server never has any knowledge of the secret content, and your data is secure (*) even when the server is breached.
Encryption is done using GPG. One of the admins installs your public key on the pstore server. After that you're ready to go.
(*) Security of course depends on everyone using strong secret keys and everyone keeping them private.
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You have set your .pstorerc
:
::
$ cat ~/.pstorerc
--store-url=https://my.pstore.server/
List all machines that contain example in the name:
::
$ pstore example
Machine User access
------------------------------------------------------------------------
+ new.example.com joe, walter
+ walter.example.com walter
List machine password for walter.example.com
:
::
$ pstore walter.example.com
ip-address = 1.2.3.4
password = wAlTeR!
Add a new machine password, also accessible for joe:
::
$ pstore -c walter2.example.com +joe
Type new machine password:
Type new machine password again:
$ pstore example
Machine User access
------------------------------------------------------------------------
+ new.example.com joe, walter
+ walter.example.com walter
+ walter2.example.com joe, walter
$ pstore walter2.example.com
password = abc
Add a public (unencrypted) and shared (encrypted) property to the new machine:
::
$ printf walter2 | pstore walter2.example.com -ps ssh-username
$ cat ssl-cert.key | pstore walter2.example.com -pe ssl-cert.key
$ pstore walter2.example.com
ssh-username = walter2
ssl-cert.key = (1533 byte encrypted)
password = abc
See the contrib
directory for bash completion scripts and a dirty
hack to supply the password to the ssh client automatically.
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Installing the pstore client is a matter of running
pip install ./pstore-<version>.tar.gz
. This will install the
necessary requirements and install the pstore binary in your path.
Installing the pstore server is a little bit more work:
Install pstore
, the client (see above).
Refer to the Django project for detailed django installation procedures. But it should basically be something like this:
django-pstore
.pstore/settings.py.template
to pstore/settings.py
and
configure as needed. Those comfortable with Django, can choose to
integrate it into a different project. Don't forget to set the
DATABASES
and SECRET_KEY
variables.DJANGO_SETTINGS_PATH
and/or DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE
environment variables with the right values.Run django-admin.py syncdb
. It will create the necessary tables
and an admin account for you.
Check and alter pstore/wsgi.py
as needed.
You can now run the development server to test:
django-admin.py runserver
. When you're done testing you should
set it up on a proper webserver (nginx+uwsgi, apache+mod_wsgi or
whatever floats your boat). Don't forget to tell the wsgi server
your virtualenv path if you're using that.
Set up users and keys:
pstore/settings.py
you'll surf to
localhost:8000
(or where the site is running). Supply your admin
credentials.Auth -> Users
. Add users as appropriate.Go to Pstore -> Public keys
. Add a single public key for every
user that should be using the system. A GPG public key can be
extracted from your keyring using
gpg --export --armor my@email.addr
. The key
value should look
something like this. The description
is for human consumption
only.
::
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) | mI0EULkssgEEAKeoPrMO5CHxoO8/KTXLA1FP2IQr4n3Og+DvsziIZ6vdcDmhtcsx ... AK968N1Yrw+ytDuus3s7xPXYAw== =TEm/ -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
If you have good reasons, you can go old style and use the SSH public key here, like this:
::
ssh-rsa AAAAq2qMaC2...fBPcPsqMcwqsMHnBCzA= myname@myserver
Using GPG is preferred however.
Set up the client:
~/.pstorerc
. You can put anything in there that you see in
pstore --help
, but generally you'll want one or more
--store-url=
items in there. And possibly a --user=
.pstore -c my.first.machine
to create a password for
my.first.machine.You're ready to go. Call the pstore client with --help
and
--help --verbose
for more help and tips.
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How do I install a downloaded tgz?
::
sudo pip install ./pstore-<version>.tar.gz
sudo pip install ./django-pstore-<version>.tar.gz
For the client you'll only need the first package.
configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH
.. or various other compile related errors when running pip install
.
Make sure you have a C compiler (gcc) and python development headers.
::
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install python3-dev
Or you could install the dependencies manually.
::
# for the client and server
sudo apt-get install python3-gpg python3-pycryptodome
# for the server
sudo apt-get install python3-django python3-mysqldb
fatal error: gpgme.h: No such file or directory
pygpgme requires the libgpgme development headers.
::
sudo apt-get install libgpgme-dev
Couldn't find index page for 'pstore' (maybe misspelled?)
Make sure you install the pstore
package before installing
django-pstore
. This shouldn't be necessary anymore, as we've
uploaded that package to PyPI.
How do I uninstall?
Uninstalling the client package is done using *pip*:
::
sudo pip uninstall pstore
You may need to ``rm /usr/local/bin/pstore`` manually.
For the server, you'll probably need to do more than just uninstalling
``django-pstore``. After all, you put the app in a Django project and
you created a database for it.
Note that dependencies like Django, pycryptodome, gpg, aren't
uninstalled automatically.
ImportError: No module named pstorelib.bytes
When running ./bin/pstore
when developing, you'll need to tell it
where the packages are:
::
export PYTHONPATH=`pwd`
NOTICE: re-using cached password
To make the application usable, decryption passphrase information has to
be cached. Preferably, this is done using some kind of password agent
like *gpg-agent*. If such an agent is unavailable, we cache the password
in cleartext in memory for the duration of the pstore command.
The NOTICE is there to remind you that it is not as safe as it could be.
How do I make password caching agents forget my password?
Your graphical desktop environment generally starts a password caching daemon. That could be seahorse-agent or gpg-agent or something else.
I couldn't find a way to reliably clear the seahorse-agent password cache. I only found reliable ways to kill it by accident (on Ubuntu 10.04).
The gpg-agent (gnupg-agent package) seemed more stable. (Log out and
in after install.) Making it forget your cached passphrase is a matter
of sending it a SIGHUP
.
::
pkill -HUP gpg-agent
(If you're now wondering, like me, who then caches your decrypted
private ssh key: it's the ssh-agent, even though it's the gnome-keyring
who asked for the password. Clearing the ssh-agent cache is a matter of
doing ssh-add -D
.)
Issues with large file support
When running the integration test, you could see something like this:
::
* Large file support (adding large public file):
backend error: could not connect to http://127.0.0.1:8000
FAIL: could not write large unencrypted file
> NOTICE: not encrypting the value
This is likely caused by apparmor(1) on the mysqld. We need read/write
permissions in /tmp.
Further, you may need to increase the ``max_allowed_packet`` to
something higher than ``16MB`` if you want to store larger files.
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.. |PSTORE| image:: assets/pstore-head.png
:alt: Pstore