In BenjaminWolfe/speakfriend: Very Easy Password Management

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speakfriend

speakfriend offers simple, straightforward password management for R users and advocates.

Password management is what Emily Riederer calls a "first-mile task," the kind an R champion should make as simple as possible, as early as possible, to empower and engage their community. speakfriend builds on the powerful and flexible keyring package to help community developers do just that.

RStudio's keyring package provides secure password management for R, as Sharon Machlis outlines in this excellent article.

speakfriend adds 4 elements targeted to the beginner:

1. Descriptive prompts. keyring shows the same featureless prompt no matter what's being asked. This can be confusing for new users who need to know clearly whether R needs their master password or an individual system password, and why.
2. Supportive default behaviors. For example, if the user tries to create a key but doesn't yet have a keyring to store it, speakfriend will offer to create one first, and explain what it's doing.
3. Instructive messages. speakfriend strives to give the user as much information as is helpful. For example if an action that requires interactivity is being run outside an interactive session (e.g. unlocking the keyring), speakfriend will fail and tell the user exactly what function they need to run.
4. Streamlined functionality. speakfriend uses just one keyring and stores just one password per system. This is all many users need. keyring allows more options, outlined below under Nomenclature.

Installation

speakfriend is not yet available on CRAN. You can install it from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("BenjaminWolfe/speakfriend")

Example

speakfriend has just 11 exported functions:

library(speakfriend)

create_keyring()        # creates keyring, leaves it in unlocked state
has_keyring()           # checks for existence of keyring
lock_keyring()          # locks keyring, does not require master password
keyring_locked()        # checks if keyring is locked
unlock_keyring()        # prompts for master password, unlocks keyring

list_keys()             # lists keys
set_key("system_name")  # prompts for individual password, sets key
has_key("system_name")  # checks for existence of key for a given system
get_key("system_name")  # returns individual password
drop_key("system_name") # forgets individual password

drop_keyring()          # e.g. if you forgot your master password

Package Name Inspiration

speakfriend is named after a scene in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring. The party comes upon an enormous stone door with an elven inscription:

The Doors of Durin, Lord of Moria. Speak, friend, and enter.

They tried several passwords, spells, and gestures, until finally it occurred to Gandalf that it was a simple riddle. They needed only to say the elven word for "friend" and the door would open.

speakfriend aims for a similar level of simplicity; one might say you type speakfriend, and enter. And as the Doors of Durin once allowed unfettered trade between the words of the Dwarves and the Elves, hopefully this package will help you develop a thriving community of R users.

I considered and avoided using Tolkien analogies in a more heavy-handed way, beyond perhaps the preceding paragraph. For clarity I instead retained the original keyring analogy (see below).

Nomenclature

In the keyring analogy, a key stores one username-password combination. You might need more than one key per system, if you use more than one username to access it. A keyring is a store for one or more keys. So, conceivably, you could have multiple personas on your machine, each with their own keyring, each accessing multiple systems.

keyring allows other possibilities as well. You could have multiple keys for a given system, all on the same keyring. Or you could use no keyring at all; this would allow you to keep any number of keys, just the same, but without a master password to lock them.

speakfriend requires users to use a keyring. You can still use multiple keyrings with options(keyring_keyring = "your_keyring"), but you can use the package without specifying anything about keyrings. speakfriend does not currently allow multiple usernames per system, again as a bid for simplicity. For any given system, you simply call get_key("system_name") to get the user's one password for that sytem.

Font Attribution

The speakfriend hex logo uses the Party Business font by Nancy Lorenz. A die-hard LotR fan might note (and do well in noting) that the font is inspired by the handwriting of Bilbo Baggins, a humble hobbit, rather than that of the legendary elves who forged the Doors of Durin. On that note, though, this package really should be for the Bilbos of the world. Besides, elvish fonts are hard to come by, and this one is license-free.

I did make one modification to the original font. Lorenz's "k" has a crossbar that makes it look a bit like an "r." And "spearfriend" would have made for a rather imposing R package.

BenjaminWolfe/speakfriend documentation built on Nov. 18, 2019, 5:09 a.m.