Recovering your passwords in Firefox

Once you allow Firefox to save a username and password combination for a specific web site (specially new ones), chances increase that you will eventually forget it and feel trapped in the computer where you have the passwords stored.

Fortunately, Firefox allows you to see your saved password. To do so:

• In the Tools menu, select Options…
• In the Security page, press Show Passwords…
• Press the Show Passwords button, and you are ready to go. If you have set a Master Password, you will be asked for it here.

If you have set and don’t remember your master password you can consider your passwords lost.

I recently tried Firefox Password Recovery Master, a tool capable of reading and showing Firefox passwords even encrypted with a Master Password according to the product description. I have tried it several times, in safe mode, with or without a master password and haven’t been able to see a single password or username yet. The tool comes with a carelessly edited help file (it refers some other tool it must have been copied from) and since customer service was unable to provide further information or any kind of support at all for this $19.95 utility in the week I tested it, I would suggest staying away from it.

And this is how things are supposed to work. Jesse Ruderman, a contributor for Firefox and other Mozilla products on security topics, confirmed that if the tool works it would be a critical bug.

Since Firefox will keep asking for the Master Password every time you try to save one, you may want to reset it, to at least restore functionality. To do this:

• In the location bar enter chrome://pippki/content/resetpassword.xul
• Press the Reset button. Note that you will loose all your stored passwords, private keys and certificates as explained in the dialog

Now you can set a new password and try to remember it this time.