Safe and SafeDesktop 2.2.6

Safe and SafeDesktop project are created so that a user need not remember all her login names and passwords.
What is Safe?
Nowadays, every person is forced to remember lots of sensitive data to interact with machines during daily life. For instance, automatic teller machines ask for numerical passwords and email accounts are protected by using loginnames and passwords. For many good reasons passwords should be difficult to guess and every password should be used for one account only. In reality, this makes it quite difficult for the average person to remember all the different passwords. Hence, people tend to choose easy to remember passwords and many persons re-use their passwords in such a way that the same password is used for many accounts. Even worse, it is quite common to write down passwords and stick the note to a screen frame. All these facilitations of remembrance lower the burden for hackers to get access to sensitive data and abuse computers.
The idea behind Safe is that a user must not remember all her loginnames and passwords. Instead, the user utilizes her cell phone to store sensitive data in an encrypted way. Only one root password is required to be remembered to get access to the data.
This concept works pretty well, because nowadays, cell phones are ubiquitous. Usually, cell phone owners carry the phones in their pocket regardless where they are going. So, running Safe on a cell phone means that passwords have no longer be to remembered and can be chosen as difficult as it can be. The only requirement is that the cell phone in question supports J2ME applications.
What is SafeDesktop?
SafeDesktop provides the same features as Safe does but it runs on desktop machines. Java is also used for the implementation of SafeDesktop. This allows SafeDesktop to be executed on almost all modern desktop operating systems (e.g., Microsoft Windows, Linux).
A synchronization mechanism is part of SafeDesktop to keep the data synchronized between Safe and SafeDesktop.
How does it work?
First, a MD5 hash of the root password is stored and compared with the users input, that is requested at applications startup. If the hash of the users input is equal with the stored hash, the user input is used as key to decrypt the data.
Second, a IDEA cipher is used in CBC mode (of operation) to store data in an encrypted way. The password that the user entered at startup, is used as a key for the IDEA cipher.
Version restrictions:
- Safe and SafeDesktop have their limits. The limits are inherent - they came from the IDEA cipher, the hardware, the operating system and all the other parts that are used as a blackbox.
- But remember, there are things you can do to push the limits: review the source code of Safe and SafeDesktop. Even more security relevant: Select a difficult to remember, long and random root password. With Safe and SafeDesktop you have only to remember one password, so, make it difficult for the opposer to get access to your sensitive data.
Enhancements:
- An IPv6 problem has been fixed (no exception will be thrown when the machine uses IPv6).
- Exception handling has been improved (error messages provide hints as to what went wrong).
- A minor bug has been fixed (mainly how and when Alerts are shown).