Firefox 2.0 Password Manager Bug Exposes Passwords

zbuffered writes, "Today, Mozilla made public bug #360493, which exposes Firefox's Password Manager on many public sites. The flaw derives from Firefox's willingness to supply the username and password stored on one page on a domain to another page on a domain. For example, username/password input tags on a Myspace user's site will be unhelpfully propagated with the visitor's Myspace.com credentials. It was first discovered in the wild by Netcraft on Oct. 27. As this proof-of-concept illustrates, because the username/password fields need not be visible on the page, your password can be stolen in an almost completely transparent fashion. Stopgap solutions include avoiding using Password Manager and the Master Password Timeout Firefox extension, which will at least cause a prompt before the fields are filled. However, in the original case detailed in the bug report, the phish mimicked the login.myspace.com site almost perfectly, causing many users to believe they needed to log in. A description of this new type of attack, dubbed the Reverse Cross-Site Request (RCSR) vulnerability, is available from the bug's original author."

Comments

But but but....

[Anonymous Coward]

...secure by design!!

I sense a disturbance in the force...

[LordEd]

...as though millions of Firefox users were laughing at IE users, and were suddenly silenced.

Cue "still more secure" arguments now.

Re:I sense a disturbance in the force...

[LordEd]

I tested the proof of concept attack on IE7 before posting. The attack failed. TFA even says

RCSR attacks are also actively targeting Microsoft Internet Explorer, however a flaw in Firefox makes the attack much more likely to succeed.

Go RTFA (the proof of concept one) using IE and reply if you get a different result. I didn't try it with IE6.

Re:I sense a disturbance in the force...

[ticklish2day]

I switched to IE7 a week ago after Vista RTMd. I don't miss FF. I've also been running without anti-virus for the entire week. I ran a system virus scan today and ZILCH - no viruses. No spyware or adware either. It might have to do with the fact that my machine isn't connected to a network...

passwords have failed

[hackstraw]

Now that its 2006, can we now use a better form of "authentication" than a few ascii characters?

Every website wants you to have a password. You know, for important stuff like making a purchase because you use a password for a purchase at a brick and mortar store, right?

Well, since its a good practice to use unique passwords, and users get forgetful, then they use the web browser tool to store their passwords, then they forget their passwords, and when they use another computer or update their existing one, their tool does not work, and if it does work, then the browser gives away your passwords.

I don't use a password to get into my home, I don't start my car with a password, I don't use a password to get into my work. In fact, I don't even have a key for my work, server room, nothing (RFID). But all day at work, these programs continually ask for my password to the point that I dont consider my password secure because I have to change it, and use it so much, I'm desensisized (sp?) and say who cares?

Can we get over passwords soon?

Re:passwords have failed

[AlXtreme]

I don't use a password to get into my home, I don't start my car with a password, I don't use a password to get into my work. In fact, I don't even have a key for my work, server room, nothing (RFID).

Locks get picked. Cars get stolen. RFID can be disrupted, tampered with or your card can get stolen (I'm assuming you don't have RFID tags in your arm). Likewise, passwords can be sniffed. Hell, it doesn't matter how good your encryption is, all it takes is a videocamera pointed at your keyboard.

How far you go, it doesn't matter. There will always be a trade-off between security and convenience. Personally, I trust a good lock more than I trust RFID. But even if you go all the way to biometrics, there will always be way a to hack the system.

Even so, this Firefox security flaw is a nasty one.

Re:passwords have failed

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

I strongly hope so. My recommendation would be public key authentication, the way SSH can do it. You'd need a private key (possibly on a crypto card, but a thumbdrive or floppy or whatever works fine) and a password for that. You authenticate to the key when launching your encryption agent, then any website that wants to verify who you are contacts your agent and does the authentication there.

Infinitely more secure than our current password system, a lot more convenient (think Microsoft Passport's bragged about convenience, except none of your data is stored on a central server), and all around the BetterWay(tm). The main downside if when roaming to another machine if you don't have your key, you don't have access. This can be addressed with either being able to fall back on a password (removing a lot of the security), or some means of authenticating to your home computer.

You could also add some sort of spec for feeding VCard info into the agent so that sites could use it to do a sort of shared profile feature, where you'd authorize a site to receive certain info and save you a lot of time filling stuff out.

Unfortunately this is just yet another thing on the list of "tech the way I think it should be", not anything on anyones todo lists.

Re:passwords have failed

[Crudely_Indecent]

Passwords work great for me. I, however, use them with care.

Any site that uses financial information (my bank, eBay, PayPal, Amazon, or whatever I'm buying, my own servers, etc.) doesn't get the password stored in any form of password manager. On the other hand, inconsequential services like news sites, LUG sites, aquarium discussion groups and the like may have the passwords stored. If it's important, don't store it, don't write it on a post-it note, don't tell your friends.....people cannot be trusted.

It seems that any security protocol can be circumvented by exploiting the end users who use them poorly or rely on something other than common sense for security.

It took all of about 5 minutes to explain phishing to my girlfriend. Now, she's almost 1/104358506th as paranoid as I am, which is a good start.

Now, I'm out of tinfoil......off to the store.

Is it used?

[oyenstikker]

People actually let their browsers remember their passwords? I have never trusted my browser that much.

Re:Is it used?

[Odiumjunkie]

> No biggie, except that the 'reveal all passwords' button exists (and, last I checked, required no authentication to use). Firefox, for as long as I can remember, has allowed you to set a master password, without which the password manager will not populate any password feilds and will not allow the viewing of any stored passwords.

Re:Is it used?

[makomk]

I use Konqueror/KWallet to remember most of my password. It's encrypted (requires a password to access), only fills in the forms on the page you originally hit "Save Password" on (inconvenient, but helps reduce the security issues), and closes the wallet (requiring re-entry of the password) when I lock my screen, my screensaver starts up, or after 10 minutes of non-use of the wallet. Slightly paranoid compared to Firefox, but it works.

Not just Firefox 2.0, also IE6/7 and earlier F'fox

[Andy_R]

According to the Bugzilla link, this bug is also present in pre 2.0 releases of Firefox, and IE 6/7.

So much for me being smug about going back to Firefox 1.5!

Not a lot of better options

[Kadin2048]

If you have 50-100 passwords at various sites, established over years, there's really a shortage of other good options. You can go the old-school route and just write them all down on a pad of paper, or the slightly more sophisticated route and put them in a text file or encrypted database on your local machine, but that doesn't help you when you want to log into a site from another machine.

I was disappointed to hear of this vulnerability, because I use Google Browser Sync pretty heavily for keeping track of cookies and trivial passwords, and to be honest I'm not really sure what I'd do without it. More important passwords I keep in an old Palm Pilot using a GPLed password-management and generation program on it, but recalling passwords from it is a pain (takes several minutes to get Palm out, type in master password, etc.).

Re:Arrrrr

[jesser]

When browsers added password management features 5 (?) years ago, there weren't a lot of sites that required passwords, included user-generated content, and allowed that user-generated content to include password fields. But there were (and still are) many sites where loading just about any URL on the site could give you a "you need to log in" page.

I'd be perfectly happy with this becoming part of the accepted security model for web applications, just like "don't let user-generated content include SCRIPT tags with arbitrary content".

no need to save passwords --generate em on the fly

[caseih]

There is a neat little piece of javascript at http://www.xs4all.nl/~jlpoutre/BoT/Javascript/Pass wordComposer/ that lets you just think up a master password in your head and then use this applet to automatically generate a site-specific, unique hash and fill in the password field automatically. This way you can remember the passwords easily, you never have to save them or write them down. And if one site gets compromised, that password (the hash) won't work with any other site. The drawback is that if you don't have this piece of javascript then you can't get into your sites.

Java ring?

[CustomDesigned]

Remember the Java ring? It had a processor and stored the private key in a tamper resistant case (erases instantly when case is compromised). PC programs would ask the Java ring to sign things. A virus could get bogus signatures while it was connected, but couldn't compromise the key. Unfortunately, it used a funky "One Wire" adaptor to get power and talk to a PC. If only they would reintroduce it in a USB format!

Many FF fans would say...

[patio11]

... this is just because IE6/7 have poor compatibility with the rest of the world. They can't even support the exploits, anymore, honestly.

OK, jokes aside, someone just released an exploit into the wild which *can't work on IE*. And they presumably still thought they were going to get something of value on it. Hiya, FireFox, welcome to the "visible enough to be a target" club. And it only gets worse. I hope your million bug finding eyes are bright and perky because it only gets worse and it never, ever stops.

Re:Many FF fans would say...

[CastrTroy]

The password manager should only fill in the password on the actual page you have entered it on before. This is just common sense. There's many situations where you might enter different credentials at different parts of a site, or where entering your information at one page under a certain domain might actually be a bad thing. This is why I have password manager turned off on all my browsers. It's a littl more work to remember passwords, but it's a lot safer.