Ylva - Command line password manager

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What's in a name

Ylva is an old Swedish female name, it means "she-wolf" a derivative of Old Norse úlfr.

When it comes to the password manager, before the release 1.4, Ylva was known as Titan. I renamed the project because Ylva has a special meaning to me and I like to type it multiple times a day.

Why Ylva

Password management belongs to the command line, deep into the Unix heartland, the shell. Ylva makes managing passwords easy and secure. It's a traditional command line software written in C. Ylva is very portable and should run fine on most Unix-like operating systems. Ylva is mainly developed on Linux.

Command line password manager is useful. You may choose to run it on a remote server to make your passwords available remotely (over SSH etc.). No need to sync your password database between machines.

How does it work?

Ylva uses OpenSSL (or LibreSSL) for encryption. For password database SQLite is used. Ylva encrypts the database using AES with 256 keys. Encrypted database is authenticated using HMAC. For key generation PKBDF2-SHA256 is used with 200 000 iterations.

Ylva does not stay running, so possible plain text passwords are not in memory except for a very short while. For example, running command ylva --auto-encrypt --list-all would list all the password entries, encrypt the database and then exit. Plain text passwords will be in memory only couple of seconds. This makes it very hard for malware to steal them.

When the database is decrypted, it's readable only by the owner (chmod 600). Ylva does that automatically for the database file so you don't have to change the permissions.

Open source

Ylva is licensed under the MIT license and available for free of charge.

At this time I do not provide binaries for Ylva. Source code is available on Github. If you want a stable release, see releases.

Manual and support

Ylva comes with a manual page. It's also available online if you prefer that.

Support is available by email (niko@byteptr.com) or on IRC ylva@Freenode. You can also file a feature request or a bug report.

Copyright © Niko Rosvall 2020Made in Finland