JPasswords Project News

GENERAL NEWS

ROADMAP AND ASSOCIATED NEWS

JPasswords 0-5-0 Released! 01 September 2007 After a long time of waiting, the new version of JPasswords has seen the light of day. JPWS 0-5-0 is the best JPasswords you have ever experienced! With this version usability has been refined and you will unlikely find the presented set of application and data security elements anywhere else in password programs. A lot has been improved, and only the major points are listed below. Portable Modus. Perhaps the most striking new feature is JPasswords' new Portable Modus which allows easy transport of a JPWS installation from one host to another, on removable media like USB-sticks. The Portable Modus adapts to different environment specific settings, ranging from file/directory naming to browser reference, GUI-style and application fonts. Details on application you can find under "Tips & Tricks". Scaling File Security. Today the greatest risk for your database, when it falls into the hands of a burglar, is password guessing with machine aid. With JPasswords you can scale the verification delay time active on database access between four security levels, ranging from 2,048 to 2,048,000 calculation loops. Moreover, you can even modify this security level after the file has been created. Undo and Redo Operations. A great asset for your ease of use and comfort is the exhaustive Undo/Redo function now available in JPasswords. All database modifying operations in list level, and likewise all modifications during record edition, can be undone and redone. Automated File Backup. Depending on the OS environment you are using, files may get lost during or outside of program execution with some probability. JPasswords now facilitates an automatic backup function which creates a date-tagged backup file with every save operation you perform. At the same time it is striking easy to reload a previous database state through menu options. Users testing the new edition have found this feature already very instrumental. Shiny New Look-And-Feels! JPasswords offers a second, luxury edition of the JPWS program. It holds additional look-and-feels which are well known by the Java community. Their names are "Kunststoff" and "JGoodies Plastic". With these new LAFs a more stylish appearence of the GUI can be achieved. Since this program is considerably larger than the plain version, it is offered separately. All this said is fairly sufficient good reason to upgrade to the new version or start using JPasswords right away! Remember you can import and export password data in JPasswords via CSV function and thus migrate from other applications or back, once necessary. By the way, KeePass export files can be read instantly. PWSLIB 2-1-0 Released! 01 September 2007 Together with JPWS 0-5-0 the base backend library to realise Password Safe files is released to the public. It contains some important bug corrections and features minor enhancements. Developers are recommended to upgrade! Details of changes can be found under "PWS Java Library".

JPasswords' Database Formats 01 September 2007 JPWS 0-5-0 uses Password Safe (PWS) V3.2 as database format. This format can be seen as harbouring a minor design flaw - as it per definition does not allow the user key to influence the quality of technical encryption and hence its security is strongly depending on third party circumstance. (Details available in our Security News Archive.) - In practice, however, this flaw does not come into effect as long as a high quality application is creating the files, which is capable of generating good cryptological random data. You can trust that JPasswords is at the state of art to comply with this requirement. Given you use JPasswords, PWS is an excellent format. Other than many erroneous and only apparently safe formats on the market, it appears to really force a brute-force or password-guessing attacker into calculating security validation loops - and in JPasswords you can set them to millions! Still there is rarely something good which cannot be made better. I intend to introduce a new file format with one of the upcoming JPWS versions. This format is a new design by myself and is currently under validation. I hope to be able to introduce groundbreaking security features which will make the format superior to PWS. Organization of data will be very similar to PWS and based on a multi-purpose or multi-application design with forward and backward version compatibility. When introduced, JPWS will support two basic file formats, the new format and PWS. Choice will be there for the user to use either one. PWSLIB Development Discontinued! 01 September 2007 As to my current plans, PWSLIB 2-1-0 will be the last edition made available to the public. With the new, modularised database structure intended to be introduced with JPWS 0-6-0 or JPWS 0-7-0, the old PWSLIB becomes obsolet. It is a fairly mature package and developers should be able to use it even with future versions of the PWS format, as the format is now designed to be multi-purpose, backward and forward compatible. It is also my intention to offer the new database modules as a separate package which can substitute the functions of PWSLIB.