First of all: No I am not dead and yes I will continue to blog here. I just took a bit of a ‘blogging sabbatical’ the last couple of months.

That said,  I  (and many others so it seems) downloaded Chrome, Google’s vision of a web browser this week and played around with it for a while. A new browser always means new (or old) vulnerabilities and Chrome does not seem to be an exception to this. Google has a pretty good track record in following up on vulnerabilities so they will hopefully fix them soon.

On the positive side, it seems that Google really thought about security in Chrome by isolating processes for different tabs and enforcing a security model. They explain most of it in a cartoon you can find here.

Although I like the layout, the speed and the software design of Chrome, I will not be moving away from Firefox just yet. Even if all known vulnerabilities were to be fixed, there is one feature in Firefox which I think every browser should have and Chrome hasn’t: a decent password manager.

As a security conscious person, I use different passwords for each website I use on the internet. Unfortunately, I can’t remember all of them, so I store some of them in Firefox. I know I could use a tool like KeePass (and I do) but for most sites I find this overkill. Now what I like about Firefox is that you can specify a master password. Without this master password, you cannot unlock the password file (signons3.txt, passwords, and key3.db, the key, in your profile folder). This even survives a copy of the files. When you copy both files to another computer, you still have to specify the master password before getting access to the stored (encrypted) passwords.

Now back to Chrome. The profile data (in Vista)  seems to be stored in C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default. There is an SQLite file called ‘Web Data’ in that folder and this seems to contain the URLs and (obfuscated) saved passwords.  Since there is no master password functionality as there is in firefox, this file can be copied to another computer. Doing this gives the other computer access to all websites were there is a password stored for in the file (yups, I verified this).
This might not seem like a big deal but think about it. Every process running on your computer with the same rights as the user (or more) has access to these password storage files. This includes malware as well…

So I’ll stick to Firefox for now