pws COMMAND [OPTIONS]

The pws tool allows you to store passwords (or anything else, really) in a set of encrypted files. Each file can be encrypted to a different set of users. pws helps you with the bookkeeping of which keys to encrypt each file to and provides a convinient wrapper to edit protected files.

In the intended use the directory with the encrypted passwords would be under SCM control and shared with other people who need access.

First you need a file where your users and group are defined in. This file is named .users. Lines consist of assignments of the form <username> = <keyfingerprint> and @<groupname> = <username>|@<groupname> [, <username>|@<groupname> …​]

Lines starting with a # are comments and thus get ignored.

The .users file is designed to live in a SCM repository, such as git, alongside all the other encrypted files. In order to prevent unauthorized tampering with the .users file - for tricking somebody to re-encrypt data to the wrong key - the .users file needs to be PGP-clearsigned with a key from a whitelist.

This whitelist lives in ~/.pws-trusted-users, and simply takes one key fingerprint per line:

Currently this whitelist is the same for any pws repositories a user might have. A patch to remove this limitation would be nice.

listing files

Every file needs a header like:

You can edit the encrypted file with the pws tool: pws ed file.

If your .users has changed, and new users should get access to existing files, you can use the reencrypt command.

If you store YAML files in PWS, you can request a single key at a time:

If available as .keyring pws instructs GnuPG to use this keyring in addition to the user’s default keyrings. This allows sharing of the keyring in the repository. Use pws update-keyring to update/initialize this keyring.

Peter Palfrader <[email protected]>