Password Manager Daemon

Password Manager Daemon (also known as PWMD) is an open source and freely distributed command-line software implemented in C as an UNIX daemon that’s capable of serving data to an application via a socket.

Features at a glance

Key features include support for connecting clients via UDS (Unix domain sockets) or remotely over TLS (Transport Layer Security), support for GPG agent, support for smartcards, keyfile support, multi-threaded support, per-element ACL (Access Control List) support, as well as file cache with timeout.

Additionally, the software comes with built-in support for multiple connections to the same file, featuring a locking mechanism, various caching options, the ability to receive passphrases when required by using a key file or a pinentry program, as well as support for element paths, which is actually a TAB delimited string.

Getting started with Password Manager Daemon

This program is distributed only as a universal sources archive, which means that you must configure and compile it prior to installation. The source tarball is perfect for those who want to optimize the application for their operating system and hardware architecture.

To install it, download the latest version from Softoware, save it on a location of your choice, extract it, open a terminal emulator, navigate to the location of the extracted folder and execute the “./configure && make” command, followed by “make install” as root (all commands without quotes).

Stores data in an encrypted XML file

The software has been engineered in such a way that it can store data in an encrypted XML file, forcing you to use the socat utility if you want to access the daemon via a user-friendly interface (e.g. socat GOPEN:$HOME/.pwmd/socket).

Under the hood

Password Manager Daemon is a library software, a non-interactive Linux daemon that has been written entirely in the C programming language and designed to make it easier for applications to use it, including those who support the POP3, SMTP, IMAP and HTTP protocols.

What is new in this release:

• Update to work with newest gpg-agent. This adds configuration parameter "gpg_agent_socket" to replace "agent_env_file".
• Fix doc/magic and the version string.

What is new in version 3.0.6:

• Write a PID file upon startup to detect a stale socket when running another instance.
• Bind to the local socket before doing cache pushing.
• Added command line option --force as an alias to --ignore.
• Fixed a few cppcheck(1) warnings.
• Fixed a bug that ignored the return value from launch_pinentry().
• Added configuration parameter "log_keepopen" for use when logging to a file.

What is new in version 2.20:

• Exit when pushing a file to the cache on startup failed.
• The command line option --ignore has been added to prevent this.
• The VERSION command now appends compile time features to the version number.
• Minor bugfixes.

What is new in version 2.19:

• The HELP command was changed to send online help for commands.
• A few minor bugs were fixed.

What is new in version 2.18:

• This release adds the -inquire option to the OPEN and SAVE commands to retreive the passphrase via a server inquire.
• Also added is the -base64 option to specify that the passphrase is Base64 encoded.
• There are some bugfixes.

What is new in version 2.17:

• This version introduces command options rather than setting options with the SET command.
• Although both are supported, the SET command is deprecated for options that can be used in a command.
• A bug in the COPY command was fixed.
• More commands update the _mtime attribute of elements that are modified.
• A pinentry segfault was fixed.
• Reusing the existing cipher of a data file was fixed.

What is new in version 2.16:

• Portability fix for systems without SO_PEERCRED.
• Use xmlSetProp() for settings attributes. May fix something, not sure.
• Added an "_mtime" attribute which is updated each time an element is modified.

What is new in version 2.11:

• Another fix for the COPY command. This one fixes copy siblings of the source
• element and also fixes references to a free'd pointer.

What is new in version 2.10:

• Added command XPATHATTR. This will operate on attributes of the expression
• nodeset.
• XPATH now return GPG_ERR_ELEMENT_NOT_FOUND when the expression doens't match
• any elements. It used to return GPG_ERR_NO_VALUE.
• ATTR SET no longer requires a value.
• GPG_ERR_NO_VALUE is returned from ATTR GET for attributes without a value.

Requirements:

• GLib2
• libxml2
• GnuPG
• pinentry