SillyDog701

[James]

FF has a password manager which allows you to keep your passwords stored on your own computer in the browser and under a master password rather than in the cloud (i.e. Lastpass). Some might claim that this is a safer solution and for the time being let's consider it to be such.

My questions then would be:

- are the passwords stored in encrypted form in the Firefox browser?

- if the answer to the above is yes, then how would a manager like Roboform be any safer than Firefox, if we forget about additional things that Roboform offers such as form-fill?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:11.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/11.0

[Antony]

- are the passwords stored in encrypted form in the Firefox browser?

Yes.

According to this page, Mozilla's password manager is encrypted with 3DES in CBC mode.
I am not an expert on encryption, Don is. However Don is in his secret hiding mode still. Anyhow, I would guess that 3DES is not strong enough for Don.

- if the answer to the above is yes, then how would a manager like Roboform be any safer than Firefox, if we forget about additional things that Roboform offers such as form-fill?

Well, someone summed it up nicely.

Because the Firefox password manager is part of Firefox, it could be regarded as one-stop shopping for security crackers and their malware. You would be better protected if you used a password manager external to the browser to save passwords; access the appropriate password in the password manager, then type or copy it into the site’s login form yourself. Still, in absence of a separate password manager, this is better than using the same password across multiple sites.

However, if you are super-secret (or paranoid) like Don, you probably won't trust a third party password manager, particularly the cloud version. It is quite likely that those cloud password managing services may have an agreement with Don's US Government, allowing Government to have back-door access.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; en-US; rv:1.9.2.28) Gecko/20120306 AlexaToolbar/alxf-2.14 Firefox/3.6.28

[James]

You're a riot, Antony. Don will be so pleased.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:11.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/11.0