Encrypted Content Management

Motivation

We started this project after many years of experience with the 1Password solution. Originally, there were few missing pieces with 1Password such as:

• command line interface (provided in version 8)
• web server (there is no publicly available server so far)
• support of multiple cloud providers and usage of on/off-site premises

But more importantly, the 1Password has changed their license based approach to subscription model starting version 8, see their reply. Even though it is profitable for the company we considered that over the time it is not a sustainable solution, e.g. the current pricing model of $5/month leads to $60/year and since such a manager is mandatory in our digital life it can lead to substantial expenses over the long run. Despite the monthly fee, 1Password does not provide the ability to use its own infrastructure, there is lack of support for different cloud storage providers and 1Password is closed source. All of these factors lead to seeking alternative solutions and the idea of implementing password manager without aforementioned limitation. The Go-language seems to be an excellent choice for such implementation because:

• it is open-source
• it has solid crypto library as part of its Standard Library
• there are numerous native GUI solutions, e.g. (via fyne.io)
• Go-based code can be ported mobile platform, e.g. gomobile.
• it supports various architectures, such as AMD, ARM, Power8, and WebAssembly which allows it to implement desired functionality in a single language and port it across multiple hardware platforms.

Therefore, after a few iterations the ECM toolkit was released and it is released here as an open-source solution.