HPASS for PC

If you think there is room for improvement in your current approach to password handling you may find HPASS helpful. One way to store and share passwords is by using a password manager. It is an often recommended and widely used solution, but not without problems.
HPASS uses an alternative approach with one major advantage: passwords are generated locally, on-demand and never stored in any central location. Passwords and a few simple settings to generate them (Secret, Special character, and Length) are never stored in any centralized location, only on your local device, so there is no danger of data breach so often reported for password managers.

A large number of sites and apps offer strong random password generation, but quite extensive search failed to find any which would allow to generate reproducible, hint-derived passwords as HPASS does.

USAGE

Assume you need a password for a website with URL=https://www.abc.com. website. You simply enter abc as a password hint into the input box and press generate button. This will generate a password string and copy it to the clipboard. After that, you can paste it where it is needed. As a convenience feature, if you enter the whole URL the app will automatically extract secondary domain ("abc" in this example) as a password hint.

Note that the default settings (Special character = "_", Length = 15) have been selected to satisfy password requirements for most (if not all) websites. Some websites will not accept certain special characters, and some impose a rather short maximum password length - 15 seems to be accepted by most.

Please note that the way HPASS generates password from input parameters (hint, Secret, Special character, Length) is one-way hash function and the input parameters cannot be recovered from the password string.

SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS

There is always a balance between security and convenience. In HPASS context it means that although keeping only local copies of any sensitive information is more secure and less tempting for any hackers then keeping it in a centralized location (just compare relative effort and potential payoff of braking once into central database with millions of password vs braking into millions of individual devices) no information is 100% secure if it is written down, the only secure data is the one that is kept in your head (barring any mind-reading capabilities :). If you are concerned about the possibility of some bad actors braking into your device and stealing settings you use to generate password (Secret, Special Character and Length), there are some steps you can take to vastly improve security of your password by paying (small) inconvenience price. For example you can (1) "decorate" hint with some extra characters e.g. instead of using abc you can always append some character(s) to it (2) use generated password as a hint and generate password again... and probably you can invent many more simple schemes to accomplish the same goal i.e. that the part of the whole password generating procedure is stored only in your mind :) Of course, if the sites you need to login into where the security is most important (bank accounts, etc) offer multifactor authentication (MFA) it is always a good idea to use it.
Last, but not least, all HPASS code is open source - you can inspect it, comment on it, and propose and contribute improvements.

SUPPORT

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions please contact info@hpass.app.