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Portable passwords: extracting your personal data from your browser

Posted 25 June 2007 at 8:43AM by Simon Dickson in IT systems and support

Ignoring my own recent advice, I bought a new laptop last week. I didn't want to, but an important business meeting forced the issue. As I went through the laborious task of exporting all the important documents and data from my trusty old desktop, it came as a bit of a shock to discover that I was actively using almost 200 website passwords.

Passwords are a way of life these days; and if you dabble in the world of 'web 2.0', testing each new site and service as it comes along, your collection soon mounts up. Thankfully, all the main browsers offer you the facility to save your many passwords; I don't know how I'd cope if they didn't. But it can be a bit tricky to extract them, and mirror them over to a new PC, as I soon discovered.

The simplest solution is to export them to a file, stick them on a removable disk (like a USB memory stick), and physically move them over to the new machine. But for fairly obvious reasons, neither Internet Explorer nor Firefox comes with an 'export' option. Thankfully, a few eager developers have stepped in to fill the gap.

IE Pass View has recently been updated to work with Internet Explorer v7's new way of storing passwords. It generates nice and simple reports listing sites, usernames and passwords - but I can't find any 'import' option to bring the old passwords into your new PC. Firefox is better served by the Password Exporter add-on, which has both import and export functionality, and even includes the ability to encrypt the file it outputs.

Moving outside the browser, there are well-regarded password manager tools which you can run from a USB memory stick, and carry from PC to PC. The open-source KeePass is a popular solution, using various scary-sounding encryption methods and good compatibility with other similar tools. There's the inevitable inconvenience of dragging a USB stick everywhere you go, but maybe it's something you're prepared to accept to ensure your privacy.

Hold on a minute... in the spirit of 'web 2.0', surely there must be an online solution to all this? Well, indeed there is. Clipperz and PassPack are two companies, both Italian as it turns out, which offer online password storage. Recognising the inevitable concerns about privacy, both promise extra-strong encryption among a collection of security measures.

But none of these non-browser solutions can quite match the no-click simplicity of storing passwords within your browser, and seeing them slot into the necessary boxes automatically, each time you visit the web page in question. So once again, when it comes to additional functionality, Firefox beats IE hands-down. I exported my Firefox passwords to an XML file, and copied them over to the new laptop: lo and behold, next time I visited a site which needed a password, the password just slotted in. Perfect. Sure, I'll have to re-export every few weeks to ensure the two machines are kept in sync, but it's the least inconvenient solution I could find.

Tags: clipperz, export, firefox, internet explorer, keepass, passpack, passwords

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