Secrets for Android is an app that allows you to securely store and manage passwords and secrets on your Android device. PCSecrets is an application that provides similar facilities for a PC.
PCSecrets Sync is a Secrets for Android sync agent app that provides a synchronization capability between the two. This makes use of the new synchronization interface introduced in Secrets for Android (SfA) 2.4.
The agent purely provides a conduit between the two applications. No data is written to permanent storage and all secrets data sent and received by the app uses the same strong encryption that is used by SfA and PCSecrets - AES-256 bit and bcrypt.
Installation
Install to your Android device using Google Play or download from the SourceForge website here.
The app requires the following permissions:
Network communication - needed so the agent can communicate with PCSecrets. Communication only occurs within the local network i.e. not across the internet.
Secrets - allows the agent to receive secrets from Secrets for Android.
External storage - used only to write a debug log to Android external storage if required for problem determination. The log does not contain any sensitive information.
The agent must be installed after SfA is installed. If the agent is installed before SfA then Android will not know about the Secrets permission that the agent is requesting and will ignore it. If SfA is only installed afterwards, communication between SfA and the agent will fail because it (the agent) does not have the Secrets permission. To fix this the agent would need to be reinstalled.
Starting the agent
As of Android 3.1, the agent needs to be started after installation. For older versions of Android the agent does not need to be started; it will be automatically activated by the Android system when required.
Configuring the agent
Configuration for the agent is provided by creating a special secret in SfA. The agent scans the secrets passed to it during a sync operation and pulls out the data from this secret. In this way the agent needs no configuration of its own, and any configuration data is protected within SfA. The agent has no user interface apart from the splash screen that identifies it and provides brief instructions.
Required configuration
In SfA, you must create a secret named “PCSecrets” (case-insensitive) which will contain the agent configuration data.
Within this secret, you must set the Password field to the password that will be used to encrypt the secrets sent to PCSecrets and decrypt the returned secrets. This must match the password that PCSecrets will use for the same purpose.
Normally you would use the PCSecrets password here as this is what PCSecrets will expect by default. As this password is held securely inside SfA it is perfectly safe to do this. Alternatively you could use a completely different one - it that case you would have to configure PCSecrets to prompt for the password to use whenever a sync operation is requested.
The documentation for PCSecrets describes more about this.
Optional configuration
If necessary, you can provide further configuration to the agent by placing key=value pairs in the Notes field of the secret:
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hostIP |
If the sync operation for some reason fails to discover PCSecrets automatically, you can specify the IP address of the PCSecrets host computer manually.
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port |
By default PCSecrets uses port 9100. If this is already in use, you can change it in the PCSecrets preferences. If so, you will need to define the same port here.
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readTimeout |
This defines the time (in millisecs) the agent will wait for a reply to a sync request to PCSecrets, which by default is 120000 millisecs (2 minutes). If this is not long enough, you can change it here. |
Error Handling
Problems detected during processing are reported using Android notifications.