this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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So basically a fancy hashing algorithm to get the same password for the same information you give it. Neat idea but I am not convinced yet.
If your Spectre secret gets somehow leaked (and your full name could easily be found), that's immediately all your current and future passwords leaked. Now, this would in theory also be a problem with regular password managers that live in the cloud. Though smart ones hopefully add 2FA or similar before they let their users log in. For offline password managers the hacker would need your secret + database to get your password. That's a lot harder. Spectre takes one of those items away, because the 'database' is their algorithm which literally runs on their webpage. All they need is a single password.
What if a site you use leaks your password and you have to change your password for that site only? Spectre won't help you with that, as it will still give you the (burned) password. So you manually have to remember which sites use Spectre for passwords and which ones don't.
Have any services that have been provided to you with a set password you can't change (eg: some service your job uses), Spectre won't help you with this as it won't hold any custom passwords. Have any weird services that requires a specific length and/or forbidden characters Spectre does? Good luck, Spectre can't help you here either. It's not a password manager.
If one password is leaked, it should let you change the key for just that one service. Eventually, you could have a bunch of different keys for different service. But then you will need some manager for remembering all those different secrets. Yay!
I see they have a counter that maybe you can set? Then I guess you just need a manager to store the counters, which seems fundamentally the same
See my response a few comments down this thread. I found the counter and password-template too. I don't have an iphone so I can't test the app, but I very much think this app stores the 'settings' (counter, template) to generate the password. Based on what the api and CLI can do.... it has to, surely. It also has the ability to retrieve a custom password.
Of course the webapp in the link doesn't do all of that. You're stuck with 1 password in 1 format. Unless you change your secret and then all your passwords change.