Ian G wrote:
On 12/7/09 21:58, Anders Rundgren wrote:
Nelson B Bolyard wrote:
On 2009-07-12 05:51 PDT, Anders Rundgren wrote:
This is an interesting project.
What's not completely obvious is how this relates (or could relate) to
for example Firefox.
I must confess that I know absolutely nothing about NSS but I assume
that the "soft-token" uses obfuscation and an *optional* password as
the sole protection mechanism.
Why would you assume such a silly thing?
I'm not aware of any other methods for securing "soft" (file-based)
secrets
unless you go under the skin of the operating system.
I think he means, the password and the encrypted store are next to
each other on the disk, which reduces to obfuscation.
Whereas, afaik, Firefox doesn't do that, it insists that the user
enter a password in, so the decrypted stuff is in memory only.
People who complain about that are completely right from a "perfect
security" viewpoint, but are dead wrong from a "market security"
viewpoint. The platform that people use is a computer as delivered
according to that old IBM spec -- disk drive, memory, CPU.
A tiny percentage know about things call trusted tokens, etc, but they
are irrelevant to Mozilla's market.
So, in this case, Mozilla's products are more or less where we want
them to be: using a software encrypted store (with a stupid name) and
having the user decrypt them when she starts it up.
iang
As I wrote in the initial posting, I know nothing about the inner
workings of NSS. AFAICT, the mentioned Secret Storage project would be
redundant if NSS already uses the operating system to protect secrets,
particularly since NSS is said to be a part of Linux. Regarding
passwords, by default Firefox does not require a password in order to
use soft tokens.
Anders
still not enlightened
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