~stef/blog/
Announcing the SPHINX
TL;DR if you are using keepass, pass, bitwarden, or similar password managers, you might want to switch to sphinx to handle your passwords (certain caveats apply see below).
SPHINX is a simple self-hosted online password "storage" protocol with some very strong security guarantees, which other password storage solutions do no possess. One of the authors of the protocol jokingly said that SPHINX could even be operated by the NSA and it would be safe (in the context of the NSA being a global adversary of course).
How does it work?
You ask the SPHINX to return the password for a given host and username pair and you supply your input password, the SPHINX oracle contributes some seed to this, without the SPHINX learning anything about your input nor your output password. In very simplified terms1 your output password is something like:
output_password = hash(input_password)*sphinx_seed
(it is a bit more complicated than that, for details see the next blogpost, the original academic paper, and our whitepaper about our extensions)
Since SPHINX is an online password storage, you do not have the problems caused by trying to sync a database across different devices.
If you like audio-visual content, here is one of the authors of the protocol explaining SPHINX in the first 20 minutes of this video.
And here is me, showing an early implementation of SPHINX in the first half hour of this video.
How is SPHINX different?
The storage server does not store any passwords, and thus an attacker accessing the storage does not learn anything about the passwords.
In a conventional password manager your input password unlocks a kind of database of passwords and reads out the password decrypted by your input password. Thus your input password is the key to all of your kingdom. Unlike with traditional password managers, you can use different input passwords with SPHINX. This means you can have some simple passwords you don't care about too much, and have a super sophisticated that protects the passwords you care about most.
The passwords are unique and of high entropy - like they would be coming out of a password generator -, making any kind of guessing attack computationally impossible. If a website gets hacked and the password database is leaked you do not have to fear a bit even if mediocre password hashing was protecting your output password in the leaked database.
If one of your output passwords gets leaked, an attacker can only run an online bruteforce attack to recover your input password. This means the attacker needs to have access to the SPHINX oracle to recover your input password from the output password.
Unlike traditional password managers, there is very limited support to store predetermined passwords. It is not recommended, but if you insist you can store up to about 40 character long passwords with SPHINX. If you really need to store longer or more sophisticated passwords and keys, then it is recommended to use some dedicated tool like age, pass, passage to store these while using a SPHINX output password to unlock them.
What are the limits of SPHINX?
SPHINX cannot do shared passwords in a team. It would compromise the security guarantee of the protocol.
SPHINX cannot store arbitrary secrets. Although short secrets are supported, doing so also weakens the security properties of the protocol - but only to the level of conventional password.
SPHINX is not a commercially supported polished end user product, currently we have a command line client in Python, an Android client and browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome derivatives. You are welcome to contribute further frontends, e.g. for Apple devices.
There are no backups to users of their password storage, since the server doesn't even know which records belong to the same user. Operators of servers must ensure full backups for restoring in case of data corruption of the records. Users either backup themselves their output passwords (not recommended) or they have to rely on the services they use having a password reset procedure.
Where's the code?
Glad you asked! I feel like you are the perfect match for hosting a SPHINX oracle for your community with this attitude!
- the library handling the basic SPHINX protocol
- the reference python command-line client and server
- the chrome browser extension
- the firefox browser extension
- a kinda orphaned windows installer for the above
- the production server
- the android client
- a docker container for the production server
- nix packages
The latest version of the production server is being dogfooded at https://sphinx.ctrlc.hu/ - in case you don't mind that this is also where we experiment with new versions and (sometimes even backward-incompatible) updates, then by all means use it and report issues back to us.
Thanks
I would like to express thanks, kudos and much love to hugo, dnet, d3v, rolf, asciimoo, jonathan, michiel, fabs, stefan and all those that I will be ashamed by later by forgetting to mention them here...
Oh - before I forget, thanks to all you future users hosting their own SPHINX oracles for their communities.
This project was funded through the NGI0 PET Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825310.
1. hand-waving away the details why the oracle does not learn anything about your input nor your output, but if you are interested look up what an Oblivious Pseudo-Random Function is.