password safes for mac

[Adam Shostack]

On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 01:06:05PM -0500, Nicolas Williams wrote:
| On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 12:32:40PM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
| > I think he's pointing out a more general problem.
| 
| Indeed.  IIRC, the Mac keychain uses your login password as its passphrase
| by default, which means that to keep your keychain unlocked requires
| either keeping the password around (bad), keeping the keys in cleartext
| around (worse?), or prompting for the password/passphrase every time
| they are needed (unusable).
| 
| This applies to ssh-agent, the GNOME keychain, etcetera.  It also
| applies to distributed authentication systems with password-based
| options, like Kerberos.

As I understand things (and I'm no expert in MacOS internals)
LoginWindow is a mandatory process, those others are optional and
configurable.  I keep keychain and 1password on short leashes, which
may not matter at all from the perspective of a sneaky trojan which
waits around and then grabs the data, but makes me feel better.

Adam
#include <stddisclaimer.h>

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