

Rate my Webapp: Securely send passwords (SendMyPassword.net) - harisenbon

Site: 
https://sendmypassword.net/<p>Details:
At my work we spend a lot of effort and time trying to get passwords to our users (Faxes, telephone, having them show up in person, etc).<p>After trying to think of a better, more secure way, I came up with the app above. You enter your password (or generate one) and it saves the encrypted PW in a database and gives you a link to access that password.<p>After the password has been accessed, it is deleted from the database, so you can be sure that the user is the only one who has seen it.<p>The passwords also expire within 24 hours, so even if the user does not view the password, it will be deleted automatically.<p>The entire site uses 256-bit SSL security, and at work it's cut down on password-related troubles quite a lot.<p>I'd appreciate any feedback on the app.
Thank you very much.
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Travis
Can you please define the pain that you're solving with a little more
granularity? Is the issue the friction of getting the password to the user, or
is it a security thing? If it's a security issue, there's still the problem of
key distribution (rather, PIN distribution).

When I look at this quickly, I think, "hmm, email solves the distribution
concern. And this isn't really a secure solution, so it doesn't solve the
security concern." So what are you solving?

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harisenbon
The pain is the inability to quickly and easily send passwords to users. Faxes
used to be the original way to send passwords, but now many places no longer
have fax machines, and giving passwords over the phone leads to mistakes and
it is often hard for users to recognize long passwords with upper/lowercase as
well as punctuation.

The main reason that sending passwords through email is insecure is that :

a) the password stays in the mailbox of the user, and can be read at a later
time

b) if the mail is intercepted by a hacker, the user will never realize that
the mail has been read, and the hacker has access to the username/password

SendMyPassword.net produces a link that is safe to send to your end user over
email.

a) The link can only be used once, so the user can be sure that the password
was not intercepted

b) The link will expire after a certain amount of time, so that even if the
user does not view the password, no one can come by later and retrieve the
password.

c) The entire site is SSL secure, and all passwords/links/etc are encrypted,
as security was our main goal.

I'm curious: How do you mean that this is not a secure solution?

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Travis
Fair enough, I was just curious exactly how you saw the issue.

My concern on security is how do you transmit the PIN used to view the
password? Unless I'm misunderstanding, and it's something more akin to pushing
a password to another user's account.

I think your product does a good job, I'm just not sure if the pain is
sufficient to overcome the additional complexity of requiring yet another
transaction to a third party. What advantage does this offer over a tokenized
link that allows you to set your password? It could also expire on opening/set
time, which would address the email/security issues above.

