> More importantly, some people have claimed that the entire password > saving issue is a red herring since there is no way to protect a secret > on the host. This criticism is worth thinking about more carefully. We > suggest that Netscape "raise the bar" by using triple-DES and hiding key > material for the cipher throughout the code. But can't you just apply > some clever SoftICE to find the key? Of course you can! Doing so > requires much more sophistication than simply cracking a "magic decoder > ring" scrambler, however. Until the next decode-netscape-passwords.exe script kiddy tool appears, that is. The key material would be better if randomly generated at installation time and spread over a various (large) files on the client. That way you need to pull a lot more than just a small prefs.js file, making your exploit much easier to notice. Of course, if the exploit that grabs prefs.js is capable of seeking in files, then this won't help much. Surely there must be some way of making the encryption key client-specific, rather than one key for everyone. It won't be perfect, but should be better than nothing... Later, Kenn
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 15:22:02 PDT