BluePass: A secure hand-free password manager

Abstract

With the growing number of online accounts a user possesses, managing passwords has been unprecedentedly challenging. Users are prone to sacrifice security for usability, leaving their accounts vulnerable to various attacks. While replacing text-based password with a new universally applicable authentication scheme still seems unlikely in the foreseeable future, password managers have emerged to help users managing their passwords. However, state-of-the-art cloud based password managers are vulnerable to data breach and a master password becomes a single point of failure. To address these security vulnerabilities, we propose BluePass, a password manager that stores the password vault (i.e., the set of all the encrypted site passwords of a user) locally in a mobile device and a decryption key to the vault in the user computer. BluePass partially inherits the security characteristics of 2-Factor authentication by requiring both a mobile device and a master password to retrieve and decrypt the site passwords. BluePass leverages short-range nature of Bluetooth to automatically retrieve site passwords and fill the login fields, providing a hand-free user experience. Thus, BluePass enhances both security and usability. We implement a BluePass prototype in Android and Google Chrome platforms and evaluate its efficacy in terms of security, usability, and overhead.