Who do you trust to hold your passwords?

Modern life relies on a multitude of on-line services. A recommended
practise is to use a different user name, or at least a different
password for each service. Remembering all these becomes a burden pretty
fast.

Writing them down to a text file is an easy solution, but also compromises
security. To solve this, I wrote this little script to store such a text
file in a secure manner.

= Design choices =

Simplicity and reliability.

To this end, data is stored in a plain text file with no specific
formatting. You decide! Editing the file can be done with an editor
of your choice - nano and vi are fine. (Emacs is not so fine, as it
tends to leave backup files laying around, revealing your secrets.)

The file is encrypted using GnuPG, and stored in a Git repository.

Implementation is a small bash script, open for inspection. This also
implies it's a command-line utility.

= Functionality =

The utility 'txvault' supports the following options:

    --init      Initialize the vault in ~/.txvault, including the
                configuration file and an empty Git repository.

    --edit      Decrypt the secrets file (or create a new one) and open
                it in editor (vi by default). Upon exiting the editor the
                file (if it has changed) is encrypted and commited in Git
                repository.

    --no-pager  Decrypt the secrets file and dump its contents to standard
                output.

Without arguments the secrets file is decrypted and piped to a pager.

= Dependencies =

Requires GnuPG, Git and a few GNU utilites (bash, less, diff and so on;
any sane Linux system should have these installed).

= But haven't this been done already? =

Web browsers offer to store your login information. Convenient but 
surely not very safe.

A number of programs, free and commercial, exist for this purpose.
Can you trust them (to not have bugs etc.)? I decided not to...
Call me paranoid, I won't take offense ;)

= Copyright =

The txvault script is licensed under the GNU GPLv2.