Secure Online Passwords

Kjell Arne Brudvik — Tue, 05 May 2009 17:15:34 +0000

Use your default password and generate secure passwords on the various web-sites you visit. It’s a definitive fact that most of the people online uses just one, or at most – 3 passwords when they travel around the internet. Often these passwords are way to easy to figure out, either based on family, names, birthdates, soccer clubs or dictionary words. Taken this into consideration and based on some ideas that others suggested, I’ve put together a small tool that will help you make yourself more secure online. Using your default password you can generate website-spesific passwords that would be far harder to break than your ordinary password. The tool uses a hashing algorithm of your choice (SHA1, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512 or MD5). You can also define the maximum length of the password in case you want to make sure that all websites will handle it; good idea would be to limit it to 50 characters.

The hash is then generated based on your password and the website, and using the “PIN code” you enter as salt-base. What you enter as “PIN code” doesn’t really matter, but should be something that you can easily remember. This is just here to make it even harder to replicate the hashes. Here you can enter anything, default is the name of your computer in upper-case. Do note that the combination of password, the pin-code and website needs to be accurate in order to re-produce your password for later entrance. Thus, you should decide for one “pin-code” and stick to that on different computers to make sure you aren’t making it harder on yourself.

You can also tell the application to store your password/pin code for you, so that you don’t need to remember them. The password/pin-code is then encrypted before being stored in the local settings.xml file. All settings are stored in this file, and written when you click the “Exit” button. All you need is the EXE and XML file transferred to other computers to ensure that you have the same configuration on several computers. A good idea could be to put this on a USB stick and bring that with you.

Usage:

The tool is simple to use, enter your password – the pin-code and the website you want to generate a password for. Could be a good idea to explore the settings and test the various settings before you settle for a configuration you would like to use. When entering a website, you only need to enter the basename of the website. For instance, if you would like to register here, you would then just enter www.brudvik.org into the URL textbox, and hit generate. The generated password is what you would use as password. You do not need to remember this password, because next time you want to log in here, you just start the tool again, enter your password/pin-code (unless you allowed the tool to store it), enter www.brudvik.org – and it will generate the password again, which you then can just copy and paste into the login box.

If you have any ideas, thoughts or feedback – then feel free to express them in the comment field below.

Download:

Secure Online Passwords (8738)

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Eraser – Secure file deletion

Kjell Arne Brudvik — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 14:00:21 +0000

Often when you work, you end up having documents that aren’t meant to be read by others. And when you then are done with those documents and you’ve secured your encrypted backup, then it’s time to remove the actual document and with secure file deletion make sure that the data can not be read from the disk. This is where ERASER comes in hand. With several different erasing methods:

Gutmann – with 35 passes.
US DoD 5220.22-M (8-306. /E, C and E) – with 7 passes.
US DoD 5220.22-M (8.306. / E) – with 3 passes.
Pseudorandom Data – with 1 pass.
Only first and last 2KB – with 1 pass.
Schneier’s 7 pass – with 7 passes.

It supports single file deletion, secure wipe of your recycle bin and you can even setup scheduled tasks to for instance, clear your free disk space to remove any traces of any documents there. And did I mention – it’s free!

Product description from the developers:

Most people have some data that they would rather not share with others – passwords, personal information, classified documents from work, financial records, self-written poems, the list can be continued forever.

Perhaps you have saved some of this information on your computer where it is conveniently at your reach, but when the time comes to remove the data from your hard disk, things get a bit more complicated and maintaining your privacy is not as simple as it may have seemed at first.

Your first thought may be that when you ‘delete’ the file, the data is gone. Not quite, when you delete a file, the operating system does not really remove the file from the disk; it only removes the reference of the file from the file system table. The file remains on the disk until another file is created over it, and even after that, it might be possible to recover data by studying the magnetic fields on the disk platter surface.

Before the file is overwritten, anyone can easily retrieve it with a disk maintenance or an undelete utility.

There are several problems in secure file removal, mostly caused by the use of write cache, construction of the hard disk and the use of data encoding. These problems have been taken into consideration when Eraser was designed, and because of this intuitive design and a simple user interface, you can safely and easily erase private data from your hard drive.

Download it at http://eraser.heidi.ie/

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Secure Online Passwords

Eraser – Secure file deletion