14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has acquired a small startup called Mitro, that focuses on password security, which is really good news.
According to an announcement posted by Mitro on its website, the team will be joining Twitter’s New York offices, where it will focus on a variety of geo-related projects.
The company won’t be integrated into Twitter, it seems, but it will continue to focus on its own products that let people share passwords to one account. There are some changes for the startup, however, the biggest of them all being that Mitro is now open-source.
“As of today, we are releasing all of Mitro’s server and client code under the GPL license on Github. We’ve been working hard to build a secure, easy-to-use password manager for individuals and groups. We’ve made great progress and we believe that the community can help us accomplish even more. With that in mind, we’re excited to be receiving advice and assistance from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in transitioning Mitro to a sustainable, community-run project,” the announcement reads.
The EFF has been doing its best in recent months to help protect people’s privacy. Following the NSA scandal, the EFF launched Privacy Badger to force sites to respect the no-tracking desires of visitors, as well as a router project. The fact that they’re also supporting Mitro indicates the foundation’s trust in the project and its impact on online safety and privacy.
“Good security practices require us to use different passwords for most or all of the websites and services we interact with. For accounts of any significance, those also need to be strong passwords of one form or another. But if you combine those two requirements (one password per site, most or all passwords are strong) then remembering all of your passwords requires an inhuman display of memory,” the EFF writes in a piece about Mitro.
The EFF considers that Mitro is distinctive among the free and open-source password managers available out there because it is architected around cloud storage. For security, the online password databases are encrypted with client-side keys derived from the master password. They believe that Mitro could turn into a valuable piece of infrastructure for the community.
People can go have a look at the source code on Github and check the system out for bugs or websites that don’t work reliably, which they can later report back to Mitro to help improve the project.