History of Strip
STRIP originated in 1998 when Zetetic’s founder Stephen Lombardo got his hands on a Palm Pilot. With the GCC compiler and some practically applied cryptography, the favorite password manager of sysadmins everywhere was born. Originally, the software was named ICRAP, or, I Can’t Remember Any Passwords.
STRIP, which stands for Secure Tool for Recalling Important Passwords, encrypted account records in its database using a password supplied by the user. It’s been very popular on the Palm platform, in particular with IT folks, for quite some time (here’s an article on ZDNet from back when the Internet’s crust was cooling, and here’s a write-up on CNN.com).
The program was free and open-source software, and we’ve had reports of it actually being distributed on some Palm devices (this is unconfirmed). However, given the almost universal abandonment of the Palm platform and OS over the past few years, we’ve ceased to officially support Palm Strip.
The advent of the iPhone platform from Apple has given the software a new life. We were getting tons of requests as users moved off their dying Pilot, Visor, and Treo devices to port their favorite utility to new platforms, in particular, the iPhone.
In 2008 we began a complete rebuild for iPhone, which included building out a brand new encryption engine, SQLCipher. In the spirit of the original STRIP, we’ve released the full source of the encryption engine for hacking, patching, and peer-review. These days we’re selling copies of Strip in the App Store, so the application source code itself remains private.
These days (2010) we’re working on full desktop versions of Strip for Mac OS X and Windows, and are considering an Android port as well (this is currently the most frequently requested port). For news about Strip, subscribe to our blog or sign up for our newsletter, below.
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