Stablecoin giant Tether continues to diversify its businesses by launching a "first-of-its-kind" peer-to-peer password and identity manager, PearPass. This follows a groundbreaking investigation by Cybernews in June of this year.
According to Tether, with this app, credentials are stored locally on the device and shared between user devices through a peer-to-peer architecture, eliminating servers, middlemen, and centralized storage altogether.
The manager features a built-in password generator and end-to-end encryption, powered by open-source cryptographic libraries, and is available at no cost. However, the company didn't specify whether and/or how it might be monetized. The company claims this new app has been audited by cybersecurity specialist Secfault Security.
"With billions of login credentials leaked in major breaches over the past decade, and the added dangers of insecure public WiFi, cloud-based password managers have become prime targets for attackers," Tether said.
Paolo Ardoino, the CEO of the multibillion-dollar company, first mentioned PearPass in June this year, when an investigation by Cybernews revealed one of the largest data breaches in history, totaling a humongous 16 billion exposed login credentials.
"The cloud has failed us. Again. Sixteen billion passwords just leaked. It’s time to ditch the cloud," Ardoino said back then.
Meanwhile, although the app was met with enthusiasm on social media, some users are already reporting issues. These include:
- Additional custom fields, for the moment, are limited to unprotected notes
- It does not appear to be possible to delete a vault once created
- It is not possible to decide the timeout for the lock screen
- Complaints about issues while importing their passwords from 1Password
The CEO promised to send these issues to the team, while emphasizing that PearPass is fully open-source.
"Fork it, verify it, and help us improve it,” he said.
Also, the company hasn't addressed questions such as how credentials can be recovered if users lose access to their devices.
PearPass is also the first fully open-source app in the Pear ecosystem, which is developing decentralized solutions for sovereignty, efficiency, privacy, and security.
As reported by Cybernews, popular password manager LastPass was fined £1.2 million by the United Kingdom’s data protection authority for failing to implement sufficiently robust technical and security measures, which enabled a hacker to infiltrate the company’s backup database in 2022. It cost crypto users millions in stolen assets.
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