Posts for the month of April 2009

Converting from MyPasswordSafe to OI Safe

Having failed to get my ​Openmoko ​FreeRunner working as a daily-use phone due to ​buzzing, I broke down and bought an ​Android Dev Phone. One of the key applications I need on a phone or PDA is a password safe. On my FreeRunner, I was using ​MyPasswordSafe under Debian. But for Android, it appears that ​OI Safe is the way to go at the moment. So I needed to move all my password entries from MyPasswordSafe to OI Safe. To do that, I wrote a python utility to read in the plaintext export from MyPasswordSafe and write out a CSV file that OI Safe could import. Grab it from subversion at https://retracile.net/svn/mps2ois/trunk or just download it​.

However, I am not entirely happy with OI Safe. It appears that the individual entries in the database are encrypted separately instead of encrypting the entire file. Ideally, OI Safe would support the same file format as the venerable ​Password Safe and allow interoperability with it. But more disconcerting is the specter of data loss if you uninstall the application. OI Safe creates a master key that gets removed if you uninstall the application. Without the master key you can't access the passwords you stored in the application, even if you know the password. The encrypted backup file does appear to include the master key, so be sure to make that backup.