The security startup behind the Mitro password manager has been acquired by Twitter, the team at Mitro announced on Thursday. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The talent at Mitro will move to Twitter’s New York offices, but according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Mitro itself, which has been backed by Google Ventures and Matrix Partners, will continue to operate as an independent corporation. Twitter wants the Mitro team to work on a “variety of geo-related” projects and it doesn’t plan on keeping the password manager.
Instead, the application, which works on most popular Web browsers and even mobile platforms, has been released as open source. The code for both the client and the server have been published on GitHub under general public license (GPL).
“We’ve been working hard to build a secure, easy-to-use password manager for individuals and groups. We’ve made great progress and we believe that the community can help us accomplish even more. With that in mind, we’re excited to be receiving advice and assistance from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in transitioning Mitro to a sustainable, community-run project,” the Mitro team said in a blog post.
The service will continue to operate as is until at least the end of 2014. The EFF says Mitro is already a mature and usable system, and promises to advise the company on how to create a sustainable project if their code proves to be secure and popular.
“Mitro is distinctive amongst free/open source password managers in that it’s architected around cloud storage. For security, the online password databases are encrypted with client-side keys derived from your master password. For availability, they are mirrored across three cloud storage providers,” the EFF wrote in a blog post. “With this design, passwords can be synchronized across all of your computers and devices with minimal effort. They can also be shared across teams and organizations. For those reasons, we’re excited about the possibility that Mitro may turn into a valuable piece of infrastructure for the community.”
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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