Password Tech Christian Thöing

Passwords are virtually ubiquitous in the digital world. Whenever you create a user account for a website, you need a secure password. When you have to change your computer or network login password, you need a secure password. Also, when protecting personal data and private communication by strong encryption, you should better use a secure password. Password Tech is a Windows application that can help you generate secure passwords and generally any kind of secure key for access control and data protection. To this end, it uses a cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator based on strong cryptographic algorithms: - Random number generation through a combination of the one-way hash function BLAKE2s and the encryption algorithm Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) or ChaCha20/ChaCha8 with a 256-bit key. - Entropy accumulation by collecting volatile system parameters and exploiting indeterministic timing from user input such as keystrokes, mouse clicks, and mouse movements. Password Tech is capable of generating a large variety of passwords and passphrases, which may be composed of purely random characters or words, or follow certain rules, so that they can be memorized more easily: - Passwords composed of random characters from a character set. - Passphrases composed of random words from a word list. - Phonetic (pronounceable) passwords based on language-specific trigram (3-letter) frequencies. - Passwords based on user-defined patterns (formatted passwords) using a variety of placeholders for different character sets. - Execution of Lua scripts with a programming interface to Password Tech allows full control over the process of password generation. - Generation of large amounts of passwords at once, which can be displayed in a window, stored in a file, or output on the console. - Full Unicode support in the entire application. Unicode encodings UTF-8 and UTF-16 (both LE and BE) are supported (conversion to non-Unicode ANSI character encoding is also possible, in case Unicode is not needed). Apart from generating secure passwords, Password Tech provides many useful functionalities related to password usage and storage: - Password manager functionality through databases encrypted with a master password, containing passwords associated with a title, user name, URL, etc. - Strong encryption using AES or ChaCha20 with a 256-bit key. Data integrity and authentication accomplished through HMAC-SHA-512. - Database protection by regular passwords and/or key files. The content of a key file is transformed into a 256-bit key and appended to the password (if both are specified). - In addition to the conventional master password, a recovery password (password and/or key file) can be configured, which allows accessing the database in case the master password is lost (e.g., forgotten). - Automatic insertion of passwords in website forms and other applications through an “autotype” functionality. - “Password hasher” that generates passwords from a master password and a variable parameter (similar to Hashapass). - Encryption of clipboard text and password lists using AES with a 256-bit key.