Transparency on Basecamp Usernames and Passwords

October 2nd, 2008 • Everything else

I’ve always thought that complete transparency is a virtue. It doesn’t matter what we’re talking about here: whether it’s inter-personal relationships, coach-team relationships or client-vendor relationships. If you’re reading this, you might be a little concerned that we’re storing your Basecamp username and password. Quite frankly, I would be too! Read on…

First of all, right now, there is no way to get around not storing them: the iGoogle framework simply doesn’t support POST nor HTTP AUTH. As a result, the Periscope backend acts as a pseudo-proxy taking requests from the gadget and doing all the necessary integration and logic to get data from your Basecamp account and serve it back to the gadget. And since your Basecamp account is password protected, Periscope needs to know those passwords to get at your data and serve it back to you. The nice thing about letting Periscope do all the heavy lifting is that it can do cool things like integrate more than one Basecamp account for you, do some time-tracking and even let you have access from things like your iPhone.

For the record, Periscope does not store any data that you request from the Basecamp servers. It merely proxies the data, filters and sorts and does whatever else you asked it to, and then serves it back to you. Periscope keeps logs of your activity in so much as it knows that you logged in and looked at the Recent Activity tab: but that’s about it! It does not know the content of the tab. It also counts clicks to various links you may click on. Periscope also leverages Google Analytics for other statistics.

What about the actual storage of passwords?

Your Periscope password (different than your Basecamp password) is not stored at all: we store a one way hash of your username and password. That way, if you forget your password we’ll have you reset it: we don’t have the ability to remind you what it is.

As for your Basecamp username and password, we store this information in a database and do so with the greatest amount of care: the username and password is encrypted using the MCRYPT_RIJNDAEL_256 cipher and stored in a physically different server than the encryption key. We are currently hosting with pair Networks who have an excellent track record and with whom we have been very happy. We also allow you to change your information from your My Account page at any time.

We built Periscope for ourselves and are glad to be able to share it with you. If you’re still concerned that your Basecamp username and password is being stored on an unknown server somewhere in the digital cloud, the best thing you can do is add a new person to your company in your Basecamp account (call it “Periscope User” or something similar), and use the credentials for that person in your Periscope stored account. That way, you’re not storing your own personal username and password, but rather a throw-away user that could be changed at any time. And remember to give it less than administrator privileges too, if you want to be even more careful!

Tags: encryption, password, transparent