Why Saving a Password in Your Browser is a Bad Idea

Passwords – the key to your internet happiness. The thing that keeps other people from access your embarrassing pictures on Google, or from accessing your bank account. Needless to say, it is very important to your online security. However, it can be a hassle when every different service you use requires a password.

This problem is often tackled by people in 2 ways:

•  create a single Master password, and hope to God no one finds out about it, or;
• save passwords in your browser. 

They both have major flaws, the former being more obvious, but the later is also not very secure and someone with access to your browser could easily extract your password without any third party tools. 

Password cached – not a good idea 

So most web browsers give you the option of saving your password. This makes it easy to navigate into your favorite websites without having the need to enter this information every time. Unfortunately, information on browsers are not encrypted and this means anyone – with basic knowledge of HTML can view your password. 

How to view a password in a browser

As an example of this, I am going to force my browser to convert my password to plain text. The example is for a GMail login using Chromium. However, this technique is usually applied to all browsers. 

All that needs to be done is to right click somewhere in the password box and select Inspect from the drop down menu. 

This will open window with all the active HTML code. All you have to do is change input type from ‘password‘ to ‘text‘ and the password will be revealed. 

As you can see, this way of storing your passwords is very insecure and is a practice I would not recommend. However, to make life easier for yourself, I would suggest using a password manager. 

Password managers

I am not going to say much about password managers. However, the Operating System (OS) that I am using – Zorin OS 12 – comes with one pre-bundled and I assume other Linux distros as well. 

For those who use Windows and Mac, I am not sure but I would suggest doing your own research on the internet. 

You can start with CNet’s list of the best password managers for 2018.   

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