Buttercup was most certainly a hobby project when we started it some years ago… At first it was just some core functionality and encryption. It quickly evolved into a desktop application and browser extension, and eventually a mobile app for iOS and Android. As we continued to work on the Buttercup application suite, we watched the community grow into a sizeable support group for making the password manager something more — a serious contender in the market, but completely free and open source.

These ideals haven’t changed, but the seriousness of the project has always been on our minds. For…

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is an absolute must in today’s online service environment, and it’s never been easier to use one-time passwords (OTPs) with all the great mobile applications out there. When enabling 2FA on your accounts you’re usually presented with a handy QR code that you’re able to scan on your phone to pop the OTP codes right into one of your authentication apps like Google’s or Microsoft’s Authenticator.

Wait.. but then your authentication procedure is entirely dependent on you having your phone too, right? Yes — To unlock 2FA accounts secured with this method, you need your phone on…

Storing password vaults on free cloud storage is one of the fundamental ideas behind Buttercup’s open source password manager. Provided is a feature-rich password management platform that can be used entirely for free, and services such as ownCloud and Nextcloud made that possible.

Dropbox is great, but to some people (ourselves included) nothing screams secure better than a self-hosted cloud storage option like the two we’re talking about here. They’re great platforms with fantastic communities that support simple protocols like WebDAV. They support WebDAV, but in our opinion they don’t treat it with the respect that it deserves.

WebDAV is…

Buttercup for Browsers 2.4.0 boasts a few new cool features that help with its usability and security. To help prevent unwanted (or even unknown) requests to URLs stored within Buttercup vaults, icon-fetching for the UI has been taken offline so no requests are performed. Icons are fetched from a local cache on the user’s computer — a small collection of popular websites’ icons with a default if the domain doesn’t have an icon stored for it.

Apple’s iOS version 12 came out with a fantastic new feature, allowing for login forms to be auto-filled with a user’s credentials that are stored in their favourite password manager. When the on-screen keyboard appears, password choices are presented at the top of the keyboard for easy access.

Buttercup supports a variety of connection types for accessing vaults both locally and remotely. Until recently the desktop application has been the only member of the Buttercup suite to support storing vault files on the local disk, but we’ve just added support for local files in the browser extension.

When adding a new vault in the extension, choosing the “Computer” item will allow the user to connect via the desktop application:

There’s been a lot going on recently in terms of platform development at MadDev, and we’re doing our best to ensure that we don’t neglect any part of our infrastructure as we prepare the next big product. Our browser extension, currently available for Chrome and Firefox, has just received a huge UI overhaul!

Buttercup certainly started life as a password manager — It’s goal was to fill in the many gaps that we felt existed in the password management landscape. We’ve noticed, while building the platform, just how much more Buttercup could be.. beyond just a password manager. Not to take away from the importance or challenge of creating such a piece of software — but passwords aren’t obviously the only piece of information worth protecting (nor are they the only type of item people will store in Buttercup).

We feel that some of our terminology has become a bit limiting, in terms…