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10/10/2012 - PLEASE NOTE. At least as of SeaMonkey 2.12.1 (maybe earlier) the pages in sections 4 and 5 below no longer work. There is the Password Exporter extension that allows exporting to a .csv file which can be opened in Excel. As of 10/10/12 it has not been updated to work on SM 2.12.1. I edited the install.rdf file to allow this. You can get it here.

Password Viewing

SeaMonkey (and Mozilla Suite (1.7.12 release) by default stores passwords in Base 64 encoding unless you activate Master Password in which case they are stored encrypted. As of Firefox .7 the default is encrypted. Both browsers now have a "view passwords" function in the Manage Passwords dialogue so this info is kind of academic at this point.

Base 64 passwords are stored in a plain text file in your profile directory. The usernames and passwords in this file can be fairly easily encoded and decoded.

The file historically was named in the format: [8 random numbers].s (for example, 56712987.s). Firefox now uses signons.txt.

Here are some different ways to manipulate, view, and edit Base 64 passwords.

1. Use an online tool - you can also download this page to your hard disk and run it from there. (I found this originally at Burnt Electrons Dot Com.)


2. You can use the location bar (URL entry bar) in the Mozilla browser to invoke a javascript command (thanks to Karsten). The following javascript commands can be copied and pasted into the location bar in your browser

javascript:btoa("mypassword")

will result in "bXlwYXNzd29yZA=="

And

javascript:atob("bXlwYXNzd29yZA==")

will decode it back to "mypassword."


3. You can store bookmarklets (a bookmark containing a javascript) to encode and decode passwords in Base 64. Once you have the bookmarklets saved, you can simply open your password file in a browser window, highlight a username or password, click the deCode bookmarklet, and the decoded word will show in the browser window. Click BACK to go back to your file and do it again.

An encoding bookmarklet allows you to highlight a word in your browser and encode it. You can then highlight, copy, and paste that into your password file using Notepad or another text editor.

See the following links for more information:

Password Decoder Bookmarklet drag this and drop it on your bookmarks sidebar or bookmarks to save it.

Password Encoder Bookmarklet drag this and drop it on your bookmarks sidebar or bookmarks to save it.

Bookmarklets Explained


4. Download this page to your hard drive and load it into Firefox or Mozilla (right-click the link to save). It will display your passwords in the browser. This will not work online due to browser security! Thanks to "ernie" at netscape.mozilla.firefox who "borrowed" the code from the Firefox 1.0.7 source tree.

4b. Here's a newer version that neatens things up a bit. Thanks to Andrew Poth.

After using either of the two files above you can save the resulting file and it will include all of your password information. Use "File - Save Page as" or right-click in the page and choose "Save Page as." Name the file and select where to save it. It will contain all your password info as well as the original script. To prevent having the script run every time you view the saved file in your browser, open the file in a text editor and delete the comments and script portions. Save the result.

MORE INFO

In the result file will be your password info. But the saved file will also contain all the original javascript code too. In order to prevent the security challenge every time you open the html file you can delete the javascript. The scripts are denoted by:

<script type="text/javascript"> all the stuff here is the script
...
...
</script>

Delete all of the script, save the file. Open it and you won't have to go through the security check/pause. Obviously the file contains only those passwords in effect when the file was originally saved.


5. (August 5, 2008) In Firefox 3 the security routine has apparently changed and the HTML/javascript solutions in section 4 above no longer work. Here is a new version that is supposed to work on FF3. I have only tested it briefly and it seems to work fine. And here is a link to a bit more info.

And, finally, I added some minor "prettying" and formatting to tailor it to my liking to produce this version. Again, it must be downloaded and run from your local disk, not the Internet!, for it to work.


This page last changed: Sunday, October 25, 2015 - 01:47 PM USA Eastern Time

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