Ked Password Manager: README

Copyright (c) 2003 Andrey Lebedev <andrey at micro.lt>

About

Ked Password Manager helps to manage a large number of passwords and related information and simplifies the tasks of searching and entering password data.

KedPM is written in python and can be run on virtually any platform the python interpreter can.

KedPM is written as an extensible framework, which allows you to plug in custom password database back-ends and custom user interface front-ends. Currently, only the Figaro PM back-end is supported. To manage his passwords, the user can choose between the GUI (GTK2 based graphical user interface) and the CLI (Command Line Interface).

Installation

Read the INSTALL file provided in this distribution for installation instructions.

Starting Ked Password Manager

To run Ked Password Manager, issue this command:

$ kedpm

This will run the graphical user interface based on GTK2. Alternatively, to use the KedPM with the command line user interface:

$ kedpm -c

Note: the kedpm program should be located in your PATH.

If you have a Figaro Password Manager database, KedPM will try to open it. You will need to provide a valid password.

After the first run, KedPM will make a backup of the existing FPM database (located in the file ~/.fpm/fpm) to file ~/.fpm.kedpm.bak. So if FPM breaks for some reason, you will be able to restore your old database. Note however, that the database, saved by KedPM itself will not be backed up.

If you have no Figaro Password Manager database at the moment, KedPM will try to create one for you. It will ask you for a password to encrypt your password data with, then KedPM will create an empty FPM database.

Graphical User Interface

The GUI is implemented using GTK2 widget library. This means the GUI will fit nicely in the Gnome2 environment, but does not require it for normal operation.

To speed up your work with KedPM, the GUI provides couple of keyboard shortcuts:

Ctrl+K Put keyboard focus on filter entry field.
Ctrl+Escape Clear filter and show all passwords in current category.

You can quickly copy any of the password information to the clipboard by right clicking on a password in the list and choosing the respective item in the context menu.

Command Line Interface

The CLI should be quite intuitive for those, who have experience with the Linux shell. Passwords are placed in categories, like files are placed in directories. You can move between categories with the cd command, show contents of a category with the ls command, and so on.

There is one difference however: passwords in the database don't have unique identifiers, like files in the file-system. Passwords in KedPM are identified by their contents. For example, lets say you have a saved password for FTP login to your site www.homepage.org. To display that password all you need to type is show homepage. This command will find the password, that contains the word homepage in one of its fields, and display it. If KedPM has found several different password records with that word, you will be able to choose one from the presented list.

The full list of commands can be retrieved with the help command. You can get help on a particular command by using the help <command>.

The "Parser" feature

One of the essential functions of the password manager is helping you to retrieve your passwords, a, password manager should also let you input new passwords to the database in a convenient way.

The simplest way to enter the password is a dialog with the password data fields. Today, most passwords come by e-mail and entering such passwords is not very convenient: you need to copy and paste several times, switching between two programs after every operation.

The Parser feature of Ked Password Manager tries to solve that problem (or at least make it smaller). Parser asks you for an e-mail then tries to figure out what information can be useful for storing in the database. Parser recognizes several common password patterns, which can occur in e-mails. For example:

username/password: kedder/secret

or:

user    : kedder
password: secret
hostname: kedpm.sourceforge.net

The Parser feature is available in the GUI from "Edit->Parse password" menu item. In command line mode you can use new -p command - it will fire up your favorite text editor to provide mail text.

Parser patterns

Starting from KedPM-0.4.0, you can edit patterns used by Parser to parse text, this allows you to better adapt Parser to your particular needs. The format of patterns is:

{field} matches the password field;
{ } matches an arbitrary number of spaces or nothing;
{~regexp} matches an arbitrary regular expression;

For example, pattern:

User{~(name)?}{ }:{ }{user}

Will find a string, starting with user or username, followed by a colon and put the string after the colon in the user field of the password. This pattern will recognize the following patterns in your e-mails:

username: andrey

or:

user    : andrey

and will automatically fill user field of the password with string "andrey".

Check out parser! Tell me what you think.