Cabinet

This is a password management library that leverages private and public key cryptography to secure your sensitive data and allowing others to easily collaborate with you without compromising security.

Note that this is in early stages of development so is not recommended to use just yet. For now this is being developed and tested only on Linux.

Goals / key features

• Secure enough to leave all your data public without worries

• Collaborative without compromising security

• No access given, no data known

• Tag based structure (something like gmail provides)

• distributed (.git)

• Any data that leaves your computer is encrypted

Vault structure

$ tree test-vault
test-vault
├── auth
│   └── key.dat
├── data
│   ├── 9c1e720dd6b044ab9ad711b37d2e3c5d
│   └── f41c68ca7d864ee8972cbbaae0fbaca2
└── metadata
    ├── 9133a3a37e1c4eebb6c8c3f924699188
    └── ebefe95d3970495bbd55004edc2e0896

Files description

Each entry on the vault has 2 files, one for metadata and other for the data. This separation allows a quick load of all the available information when the app starts and to keep encrypted the sensitive data (potentially lots of data) until is needed.

All the files (except on auth) are named randomly so they don't disclose any information.

Here are some examples of how the unencrypted files look.

on metadata/
{
    'type': 'account|note|etc',  # templating yeah
    'name': 'the real name for the item',
    'hashname': 'random hash as actual filename on filesystem'
    'tags': ['personal', 'secret', 'blah'],
    'version': 'the version of the app that created/changed this file the last time (for compatibility)'
}

on data/
{
    'username': 'my-cool-username-on-site-X',
    'password': 'supersecretpassword',
    'site url': 'https://example.com',
    'notes': 'some notes if you want to',

    'custom field': '*maybe* allow for custom fields'
}

on auth/people
{
    'secret': 'here the team secret used to encrypt all the things',
    'admin': 'here the public key?'
    'participants': ['userA', 'userB', 'userC'],  # this defines who is encripted the data for
}

on auth/keys.dat
vault-secret-encrypted-for-user-A
vault-secret-encrypted-for-user-B
vault-secret-encrypted-for-user-B
...

To be defined:

• participants list has to be signed by admin
• participants list must have the public keys

For the key.dat file a user goes through all the lines trying to decipher the key until hits its own, this prevents anyone from knowing who the participants are.

Your secret

Your secret key is used to decrypt the vault key, and is stored on ~/.config/cabinet/secrets/your-name@your-company.com/secret.key.

TODO:

One user, git sync, no digital signature verification since only one user has access to the secret key

---

TODO FROM HERE:

Access control

Each .auth/recipients file has the fingerprints for the users for which the passwords will be encrypted. If there is no such file the parent's one will be used. The recipients file will be signed by the group admin.

The admin file contains the fingerprint for the user who is the group admin and the only one allowed to edit the recipients file.

Each user in .auth/recipients signs the .auth/admin file right after verifying the fingerprint on it. Thus, user 'user-A' will generate a file called .auth/admin-user-A.asc.

In order to be considered valid, each data file has to be signed by either the group admin or a user in the recipients file.

Storage

The vault is stored on ~/.config/cabinet/vault/, this folder will be stored on a git repo and a wrapper will be created to automate git workflow. Combining git with file-level password storage allows a group of people to work over a vault of passwords lowering as much as possible facing edit/sync conflicts.