Keepass in the system tray with quick access

At please-open.it we use Keepass for passwords management. This simple and open source solution gives us entire satisfaction, only with a shared file on our internal cloud.

We tried to improve a lot the user experience by creating the simpliest passwords manager application.

Taking a look at https://keepass.info gives us a variety of implementations (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android, iOS…) and many extensions for the official version.

This official client for keepass databases is complete, not so easy to use but makes the work done for advanced users as we are.

The user experience is not so great, especially when we search for a password, copy it in the clipboard, get the window where we login and paste it.

Some browsers could have an extension that connects to keepass using a RPC or REST API exposed by Keepass, we think it is an error to say that we only need a password on the web.

For our servers, we have some Keepass databases that are generated on build (using gitlab) and deployed on servers. This is our approach, a non centralized password management, not like Vault.

We will describe our solution in another blog post later.

Where is the best place to have passwords directly accessible ? Well…

On those popular operating systems… The only component accessible at anytime is called the “system tray”

Is it the best place for Keepass ? Try it !

According to https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/misc/systemtray.html, the only way to get the system tray with Java is AWT.

final SystemTray tray = SystemTray.getSystemTray();

Then, use the MouseListener.

Yes… we can develop desktop class applications with Java, like 15 years ago. There is something other than Electron to build applications :)

And now, build the UI of the application. We use Swing because we know it, and for such a simple application… no need more.

1 Jtextfield, 1 Jlist, 2 buttons :

This is our first approach.

No big search : some libraries are able to read Keepass files.

https://ourcodeworld.com/articles/read/1009/how-to-manipulate-keepass-databases-kdbx-in-java

For now, we only use the read feature, we keep the big keepass client to add or edit passwords.

Load a database :

database = KeePassDatabase.getInstance(databaseFile).openDatabase(credentials, key);

Search for entries :

database.getEntriesByTitle(text, false)

Easy !

We just connect both the UI and keepass file, that is the result :

One search field, click on the entry to copy the password into the clipboard.

The full code (our prototype) is available at https://github.com/please-openit/keepass-tray-client.

This is clearly a prototype, it needs improvements.