Firefox Password Export
It's fairly easy to copy the Firefox stored website passwords from one computer to another, when migrating user preferences, for example. However, exporting the passwords to a plain text (CSV or XML) file requires decrypting the data contained in signons3.txt using the key contained in key3.db. There are a few programs to do this. Another route is to use a Firefox Add-On called Password Exporter to save the passwords within the Firefox environment. Unfortunately, this add-on hasn't been updated in a while. Firefox 3.0.10 flagged it as incompatible after parsing the XPI.
Instead of trying to install an old version of Firefox on my workstation, I fired up an old Fedora Live CD using VMware Fusion. After installing Password Exporter, I copied the two files over the network.
# Set the target host information
T_HOST=target
T_USER=bgrissom
T_FF_LIB="/Users/$T_USER/Library/Application\\ Support/Firefox/Profiles"
# Select the correct target profile
ssh -l $T_USER $T_HOST "ls -1d $T_FF_LIB/????????.*"
T_PROFILE=xxxxxxxx.yyyyyy
# There is only one profile in the Fedora Live CD copy of Firefox
cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/????????.default
# Copy the password files from the target machine
scp "$T_USER@$T_HOST:$T_FF_LIB/$T_PROFILE/{key3.db,signons3.txt}" .
I launched Firefox and opened the preferences (Edit -> Preferences). On the security tab is a button that is created by the Password Export add-on.
The tool has the option to import passwords too, but I haven't tried that function. I just clicked the Export Passwords button.
A dialog window appears with a disclaimer about exposing passwords in clear-text.
The file format option is hidden under the Browse view. I selected CSV because it would be easier to parse with shell tools.
When it's finished, it displays the number of passwords exported to the text file.
Before shutting down the VM, it's important to copy the passwords to another location -- preferably not a RAM disk. ;)
Posted 5/19/09 @ 3:13 AM by Joseph Lamoree
