aliasvault/README.md

AliasVault

Live demo 🚀 • Website 🏠 • Installation 📦

Open-source password and alias manager

AliasVault is an open-source password and alias manager built with C# ASP.NET technology. AliasVault can be self-hosted on your own server with Docker, providing a secure and private solution for managing your online identities and passwords.

What makes AliasVault unique:

• Zero-knowledge architecture: All data is end-to-end encrypted on the client and stored in encrypted state on the server. Your master password never leaves your device and the server never has access to your data.
• Built-in email server: AliasVault includes its own email server that allows you to generate virtual email addresses for each alias. Emails sent to these addresses are instantly visible in the AliasVault app.
• Alias generation: Generate aliases and assign them to a website, allowing you to use different email addresses and usernames for each website. Keeping your online identities separate and secure, making it harder for bad actors to link your accounts.
• Open-source: The source code is available on GitHub and can be self-hosted on your own server.

Note: AliasVault is currently in active development and some features may not yet have been (fully) implemented. If you run into any issues, please create an issue on GitHub.

Live demo

A live demo of the app is available at the official website at app.aliasvault.net (up-to-date with main branch). You can create a free account to try it out yourself.

Installation

Choose one of the following installation methods:

Option 1: Quick Install (using pre-built images)

To install AliasVault on your local machine, follow the steps below. Note: the install process is tested on MacOS and Linux. It should work on Windows too, but you might need to adjust some commands.

Requirements:

• Access to a terminal
• Docker
• Git

1. Quick Install (using pre-built images)

AliasVault comes with a install script that prepares the .env file, builds the Docker image, and starts the AliasVault containers.

# Download install script
curl -o install.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lanedirt/AliasVault/main/install.sh

# Make install script executable and run it
chmod +x install.sh
./install.sh

2. Build from Source

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/lanedirt/AliasVault.git
cd AliasVault

# Make build script executable and run it
chmod +x build.sh
./build.sh

Note: if you do not wish to run the script, you can set up the environment variables and build the Docker image and containers manually instead. See the manual setup instructions for more information.

2. Ready to use

The install script executed in step #1 will output the URL where the app is available. By default this is https://localhost for the client and https://localhost/admin for the admin portal.

Note: If you want to change the default AliasVault ports you can do so in the docker-compose.yml file for the nginx (reverse-proxy) container.

Note for first time build:

• When running the init script for the first time, it may take a few minutes for Docker to download all dependencies. Subsequent builds will be faster.
• A SQLite database file will be created in ./database/AliasServerDb.sqlite. This file will store all (encrypted) password vaults. It should be kept secure and not shared.

Other useful commands:

• To reset the admin password, run the install.sh script with the --reset-admin-password flag.
• To uninstall AliasVault, make the uninstall script executable with chmod +x uninstall.sh first, then run the script: ./uninstall.sh. This will remove all containers, images, and volumes related to AliasVault. It will keep all files and configuration intact however, so you can easily reinstall AliasVault later.

Security & Architecture

AliasVault takes security seriously and implements various measures to protect your data:

• All sensitive user data is encrypted end-to-end using industry-standard encryption algorithms. This includes the complete vault contents and all received emails.
• Your master password never leaves your device.
• Zero-knowledge architecture ensures the server never has access to your unencrypted data

For detailed information about our encryption implementation and security architecture, see the following documents:

• SECURITY.md
• Security Architecture (Diagram)

Tech stack / credits

The following technologies, frameworks and libraries are used in this project:

• C# - A simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language.
• ASP.NET Core - An open-source framework for building modern, cloud-based, internet-connected applications.
• Entity Framework Core - A lightweight, extensible, open-source and cross-platform version of the popular Entity Framework data access technology.
• Blazor WASM - A framework for building interactive web UIs using C# instead of JavaScript. It's a single-page app framework that runs in the browser via WebAssembly.
• Playwright - A Node.js library to automate Chromium, Firefox and WebKit with a single API. Used for end-to-end testing.
• Docker - A platform for building, sharing, and running containerized applications.
• SQLite - A C-language library that implements a small, fast, self-contained, high-reliability, full-featured, SQL database engine.
• Tailwind CSS - A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom designs.
• Flowbite - A free and open-source UI component library based on Tailwind CSS.
• Konscious.Security.Cryptography - A .NET library that implements Argon2id, a memory-hard password hashing algorithm.
• SRP.net - SRP6a Secure Remote Password protocol for secure password authentication.
• SmtpServer - A SMTP server library for .NET that is used for the virtual email address feature.
• MimeKit - A .NET MIME creation and parser library used for the virtual email address feature.