The other day I was curious about what other extensions the Chrome Web Store thought were “related” to my own apps, which led me to discover a number of possible competitors that I knew nothing about. In this article, I am critiquing a number of those competing with PassLok for Email and the just released PassLok Universal.
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Category: Crypto
Cryptography, steganography, and related apps
FusionKey released
FusionKey, just released in the Chrome and Firefox web stores, packs into a single icon all the power of PassLok and SynthPass. It makes a high-security password when you want to fill a password. It decrypts an encrypted message if there is one, and makes a new encrypted reply. It integrates with every web mail service in existence. And, like all my other apps, FusionKey is free. Read More
FlowCrypt review
Looking through some chatroom records, I came across FlowCrypt, a Chrome and Firefox extension that adds easy PGP encryption to Gmail. Since it is supposed to do pretty much what my own PassLok does with Gmail, I loaded the extension and took it for a spin. Unlike other products in the same space that are receiving lots of attention (ProtonMail, Virtru, etc.), FlowCrypt impressed me. It’s a shame it isn’t better known. In this article I offer you my clearly biased but perhaps richer than usual review of this extension, and compare it with my own PassLok for Email. Read More
UK citizens, use PassLok Chat!
UK’s GCQH is at it again. Now with a bold proposal to request Apple and other companies to build backdoors into their real-time chat apps, as this article reveals. And the weird things is, Apple and the bunch may be forced to comply since they are hosting those chats. But PassLok will fare quite a bit better, as the post explains. Read More
Australians, use PassLok!
I’m not Australian, but I can’t help putting in my two (US) cents’ worth on the current debate over the “Assistance and Access Bill.” My point is that the bill has no teeth since it is possible for any citizen (terrorist or not) to use encryption that the bill will never be able to control. It has been possible for years and will remain so for the foreseeable future. So might as well drop the bill and do some productive business. Read More
Split secrets by hand
They say that the formula for Coca-Cola is split among the company’s executives, so that a certain number of them have to get together in order to reconstruct it. The same is true of the nuclear launch codes, which require several persons to agree. I just ran into a clever way to do this with pencil and paper, and couldn’t resist improving on it. Read More
4 cool features in SynthPass
This post is motivated by Aaron Toponce’s comment on my previous article on the release of SynthPass. Rather than giving a short reply, I decided this was the opportunity to explain certain features of my recently released SynthPass password generator. In essence, the comment said that password generators will never be appealing to consumers because of certain flaws emanating from their very nature, which are aptly described in this article, entitled “4 fatal flaws in deterministic password managers,” published November 2016 in Tony Arcieri’s blog.
Which password generator is the best?
September 2018. You see your user ID listed as having its login compromised in a recent hack. You know you need to change your password but don’t don’t want to (or just can’t) remember yet another different one. Everybody is talking about password managers as the way to go, but you also heard about password generators, which make passwords on the fly rather than store them. You suspect that’s better than a conventional password manager. Read More
SynthPass released
Chances are you, like me, have a collection of logins, each with their separate requirements for password strength and lifetime, user ID, and so forth, and your memory has already reached the saturation point. Since writing them on a piece of paper is a no-no, you may have resorted to a password manager. There are many good ones, even free ones, but you still wonder if things could be a little easier. If you are thinking this, SynthPass is for you. It does not work like the other password managers, which store your logins more or less securely, but rather gets around the whole problem by not storing your passwords.
Intrigued? Read on… Read More
PassLok Image Steganography released as extension
Hot on the heels of this article explaining how the image steganography capabilities of PassLok and URSA work, the algorithm has been released as an extension for Chrome and its derivatives, and as an add-on for Firefox. This has a couple advantages that I explain below. Read More