A mozilla extension to store passwords and form logins in gnome-keyring
This replaces the default password manager in Firefox and Thunderbird with an implementation which uses Gnome Keyring. This is a centralised system-based password manager, which is more simple to handle than per-application management.
You can find more technical information on bugzilla[1] or on the github project pages[2].
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309807 [2] https://github.com/infinity0/mozilla-gnome-keyring
You can change the keyring in which passwords are saved by creating or editing the preference item "extensions.gnome-keyring.keyringName". The default keyring is "mozilla". This is a per-profile setting, so if you don't manually change it, all profiles will share the same keyring.
You can backup your passwords easily, separately from the rest of your mozilla profile. Your keyrings are stored ~/.gnome2/keyrings - even gnome-keyring 3.2 does this, although this may change in the future.
You can also take advantage of the more fine-tuned keyring management features of gnome-keyring, such as:
Note: gnome-keyring stores the passwords encrypted on permanent storage but it keeps unlocked passwords in memory without encryption. As a result, programs with access to the memory space of gnome-keyring (such as debuggers and applications running as root) may be able to extract the passwords. The same applies to the default Firefox and Thunderbird implementations, so this extension should not be any less secure.
Passwords will not be saved or filled in if:
the username or password element has attribute autocomplete="on"
the username or password element is already filled in by the page
(mozilla bug): the page is XML+XSLT
Currently there is no migration facility. If you have many passwords in the default password manager, you'll need to manually transfer them to gnome-keyring:
Your old data in the default password manager remains untouched, so you also need to delete that manually if you want to. This is done by going to your profile folder, and deleting the key3.db and signons.sqlite files (signons.txt/signons2.txt/signons3.txt for older versions). The old data may still be forensically retrievable from your disk, but if you were protecting it with a master password, this data would still be be encrypted.
Deleting old data will also clear the master password for the default password manager. If you don't clear it, you'll still be asked for it when you choose to "show passwords", even if this extension is active.
Build dependencies:
xulrunner must be version 31 or greater. For support for older versions of Firefox/Thunderbird, see previous releases of this software.
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[1] https://github.com/fat-lobyte/mozilla-gnome-keyring/tree/ubuntu [2] https://github.com/infinity0/mozilla-gnome-keyring/issues/20 [3] https://github.com/mdlavin/firefox-gnome-keyring/issues/#issue/4