ghostpass

ghostpass

Privacy-First Secrets Management Cryptosystem

Project Roadmap

This is still on-going and a work-in-progress.

• Plainsight Distribution
• Plausible deniability

Introduction

Ghostpass is a secrets management cryptography scheme that can hide encrypted secrets in cleartext for the purpose of distribution across public mediums. It ensures that your secrets, whether in the form of authentication credentials or actual messages and documents, can appear in plainsight as normal cleartexts, and can be confidently transmitted even in a public medium with potential malicious actors, even those that may act out with coercion to exfiltrate and decrypt it.

Ghostpass is novel in the sense that it applies modern symmetric cryptography towards digital consumer privacy through the use of textual steganography and plausible deniability. However, it should also be considered novelty because it is NOT a full replacement for current cryptographic software, but an ongoing effort to bridge together cryptography and privacy research. I encourage users to criticize, audit and expose shortcomings in order to better understand how these types of implementations can better be harnessed in the space of digital privacy.

There's quite a bit of password/secrets managers that are out there today, so why even bother with Ghostpass? In order to answer this question, let's take a look at different password managers "models" that already exist, and the problems that plague them:

• Web-based clients are centralized, and data breaches are possible since they are central points of failure.
• Offline clients ( i.e KeePass) don't enable for fast distribution across hosts and portability. They share a unified filetype that require compliant client implementations to work

Ghostpass's implementation aims to create a compromise that doesn't require the authority of a password management service, but can still enable portability for users across whatever mediums they choose.

Design

• Threat Model
• Internal Design

Features

• Secure - all fields in secret stores are properly protected in-memory and on-disk, such that attackers with even priviledged access to the host can't recover anything.
• Cryptographically Secure - information is secured and validated with secret-key authentication encryption scheme XSalsa20-Poly1305.
• Privacy-Centric - supports "plainsight distribution" using zero-width encoding to hide ciphertext within plaintext, and plausible deniability (TODO) to give back fake entries under an assumption of coercion.

Use Cases

• Hide and encrypt sensitive and private information away before going into an area of surveillance (ie. airport, government building).
• Use plainsight distribution as a means to make cold storage of keys safer on a host and in transmission.
• Employ a provably secure "digital book cipher" as a medium of transmission with another party.

Who Can Use Ghostpass?

• Journalists - hide secrets amongst corpuses of actual documents, and use plausible deniability to return bogus articles if ever interrogated
• Lawyers - protect confidentiality of clients and sensitive anecdotes before trial by encrypting them amongst fake ones.
• You, a Privacy-Conscious Digital Consumer

Usage

Build

The Ghostpacommand-line application and library package can be installed to your host with the following:

$ go get github.com/ex0dus-0x/ghostpass/

To use:

$ ghostpass help

However, to minimize the exfiltration of information from the user from a misuser, we recommend the usage of a Docker container:

$ docker build .

Contributing

To create a new branch for contributions:

# new feature branch
$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/ex0dus-0x/ghostpass
$ git checkout -b my-branch-name

# do code, do tests, etc
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Useful commit message"

# push and make pull request
$ git push origin my-branch-name

License

MIT License