Account Management / Shared Secret Generator

[Michael Titke]

I propose to include my Internet account password creation scheme into 
the current account / password / keychain management systems on Ubuntu.

Whenever you would like to do something very very important you probably 
will need a new password for subscribing to a mailing list, creating 
another online account and else. After some password you start to 
develop a scheme on how to easily create new passwords but it remains 
daunting. The password storage and retrieval is already done by Firefox, 
Thunderbird, Key Chain and Account Managers but the password creation is 
still left to the user who - as a matter of fact - only needs to 
memorize his master password.

To fill the gap I have written a small command line utility in Guile 
Scheme which serves my needs. For those interested I attached the 
program. But I would like to see this feature incorporated into the 
existing solutions in the open source world. An excerpt from the source 
code:

Human Typable Shared Secret (System Scheme)

This implementation creates a human typable shared secret
especially for protecting online accounts and it should be used in
conjunction with keychains or password managers. It is defined to
not use certain special characters which are known to be difficult
to find if the keyboard layout in software doesn't match the actual
inscriptions on the keys. It is designed to be usable with
secondary backups. Its shared secrets have the property of being
hard (but not impossible) to communicate by oral speech. They are
also hard to memorize especially when you can look at them only for
a short time. There might be other algorithms based on the
knowledge of the syllable structure of common western (and perhaps
other) languages that could produce secure /master passwords/ not
be held within keychains and password managers.

Please note the other password creation scheme mentioned: Apple's Mac OS 
X features such a tool (system settings -> accounts -> change password 
-> the little password helper panel). Maybe there are other ways to do 
this without blindly copying existing solutions. Secondary backup refers 
to the no no of paper backups.

Comments welcome!
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