Ding-A-Ling wrote: ↑Wed May 29, 2019 3:16 am
deathcubek wrote: ↑
In any case, this seems like the sort of naive little program that almost anyone could write for himself in a scripting language like AutoIt.
With "almost anyone" you probably mean anyone with at least like some basic understanding of programming/scripting. And even those may prefer to
not re-invent the wheel, if a tool that accomplishes the job already exists.
Anyhow, writing up a script that will clear your clipboard at a
fixed interval of
n seconds is easy enough - for a person who has some basic programming/scripting skills. But that's
not really what we want here, because it could easily happen that the clipboard is cleared half a second after you just copied something. What we want – and what
this program does – is to clear the clipboard after the content has
not been updated/changed for a period of
n seconds. That's something different!
Sure, it still is
not rocket science, but it is not
that "trivial" either. Requires some digging into the Win32 API in order to create a hidden window (that will receive the messages), register your window as a clipboard change listener, write up the message loop and so on.
And, if you want a nice shell notification icon (tray icon) for controlling things, then there is even more work to do.
(I don't know how much "AutoIt" could simply this process, but it feels like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. AutoIt: 29,2 MB, ClearClipboard.exe: 31 KB)
Ding-A-Ling wrote: ↑Wed May 29, 2019 3:16 amOh, and another thing occurs to me: it's hard to see password-protection as a "selling point" for this program as a decent password-manager would do this anyway and so much more. I am not sure about
Keepass 1.xx but
Keepass 2.xx offers: clipboard-clearing of sensitive data after a user-specified time-delay; drag-and-dropping of login details; autotyping of login details with the option of TCATO (two-channel autotype obfuscation) for security against keyloggers; and, of course, all the other things one might expect and need for password-management.
First of all, I'm
not trying to "sell" anything. I created the program, in order to fulfill a need that I had. Decided to share it, in the hope that it might be useful for others too.
Anyhow, clearing the clipboard is a standard feature of password manages these days – but
only for passwords that have been copied straight out of the password manager itself! I frequently Copy&Paste "sensitive" information from one place to another – such as configuration files, Excel sheets, encrypted emails in my email program, etc. pp. – during my daily work. So the clipboard cleaning feature of my password manager (which works as described) is
not sufficient here – which is why I was looking for, and eventually wrote up, a solution.
Finally, if you are working in a team that has a long tradition of storing passwords as plaintext files wrapped in TrueCrypt containers, then whatever great features Keepass & Co have to offer aren't really helpful
Ding-A-Ling wrote: ↑Wed May 29, 2019 3:16 amIf an intention of the program is to reduce the exposure of sensitive information such as passwords to clipboard-spying, does it have a sensible option to only clear the clipboard if it contains purely textual data?
Not yet. But I think this might be a useful addition – at least as an option. I will have to look if and how it is possible to implement...