This blog post isn’t exactly “news” to many readers, but I feel it is worth reminding people of the risks of letting their browser remember form data history
Being reasonably paranoid about security / privacy, one of the first things I do when starting firefox on a freshly installed machine is to go to the preferences and change the history settings so that it does not ever remember any form data. Unfortunately on my most recently installed laptop I had forgotten to do this, for inexplicable reasons, so firefox was happily remembering form data. Before clearing the data out, I decided to take a look at just what firefox had remembered over the past couple of months.
- Card numbers: Every credit and debit card number
- CVV/CVC: The 3 digit verification codes from the back of several cards
- Social security / national insurance numbers
- Bank accounts: Several bank account numbers and sort codes
- Addresses: Home address, amongst others
- Date of birth: Handy in combination with the above data
- User names: login name for many many websites, even those where I said not to remember the actual passwords
- Phone numbers: my home and mobile phone numbers, amongst others
- Answers to several “security questions” used to reset passwords on sites
You might wonder where/how firefox keeps all this sensitive data ? In a sqlite database with no encryption in your firefox profile ($HOME/.mozilla/firefox/XXXXXXXX.default/formhistory.sqlite). You can look at what is stored using the sqlite3 command line tool:
# sqlite3 formhistory.sqlite
sqlite> select fieldname, value from moz_formhistory order by value;
Or, if you trust the plugin author, you can install the firefox “Form History Control” addon which lets you browse all the data from a nice UI.
While I do have my laptop disk running with dm-crypt block device encryption, I still have a golden rule that no sensitive data is stored in cleartext in files since, while the OS is running, disk encryption is no real barrier malicious programs that find their way on to the machine. If it is a work provided machine, the data may also be finding its way into the corporate backup system & who knows if that is encrypted well enough. Any files with sensitive data have additional GPG encryption and really sensitive data will be on a separate encrypted USB stick, again with extra encryption for the files themselves. Keeping form history in an unencrypted sqlite database in my laptop home directory clearly violates my security goals. Why would a $EVIL criminal go the trouble of creating a virus which installs a keystroke logger in someone’s browser, when they can get a veritable goldmine of data by simply taking a copy of the formhistory.sqlite file.
Having known about this problem since 2003, a “fix” was applied in 2010 for firefox 4 which attempts to identify credit card numbers in forms and not store them in the form history. Great, now what about all the other data it is storing some of which is just as sensitive as credit card numbers, if not more so ? If credit card details get mis-used, liability is usually on the credit card company, but not so for social security numbers, bank account numbers, etc…
Needless to say, I have fixed my preferences in firefox so that it doesn’t remember form data, and deleted the formhistory.sqlite file to remove any existing stored data it had. I have to wonder how many users of firefox are out there running with the default history settings, without any realization that a great deal of their sensitive personal data is being silently stored in plain sight for any malicious virus/trojan to capture. The annoying thing is form history can be really useful for certain websites where there’s alot of mundane non-sensitive data that needs entering frequently. As the last commenter on the bug 188285 proposed, it would be desirable if firefox prompted before remembering form data with options “Yes, Not at this time, Never for this site”. It would also be desirable for data in the formhistory.sqlite file to be encrypted as firefox can already do when remembering passwords.
To stop firefox recording your form history:
- Select menu Edit -> Preferences
- Navigate to tab Privacy
- Change Firefox will: Remember history to Firefox will: Use custom settings for history
- Unselect Remember search and form history
To clear your existing form history
- Select menu Tools -> Clear Recent History
- Change Time range to clear: Last Hour to Time range to clear: Everything
- Expand details
- Make sure Form History is selected (optionally unselect other bits you don’t want cleared)
- Press Clear Now
If you are super paranoid, then shutdown firefox and delete the file $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/XXXXXXXX.default/formhistory.sqlite and then start firefox again
For many years now my main website has consisted of a set of statically generated webpages providing the overall structure. A couple of areas, notably my main blog were then dynamically generated using Blogger. The reason I started using Blogger was that it has the ability to publish posts directly to my webserver using SSH/SFTP, thus allowing the dynamic parts of the site to seemlessly integrate with the static parts. Then a couple of weeks ago, Blogger announced that they were discontinuing support for SFTP publishing on March 26th. Needless to say, this rather ruined my website publishing architecture. After thinking about things for a couple of weeks though, I decided this decision of Blogger’s is a blessing in disguise, because the way I managed website was completely outdated & needed to be brought into modern world.
What I in fact needed for a very simple content management system, that allowed publishing a small number of ‘static’ pages on site, but with the majority of the content being blog postings. Categorization, tagging & external links would be desirable too. Of course it has to be open source software too, capable of running on both my Debian Lenny webserver & Fedora laptop. As many people are no doubt aware, this is exactly what WordPress provides. As a proof of concept I downloaded the latest WordPress, tried out the install process on my laptop & generally got a feel for its admin capabilities. It all looked perfect, so that was a good decision made.
Exporting content from Blogger
Over the years that I’ve been using Blogger, I’ve written a few hundred postings, many worthless trash, but a fair number of them have really useful & frequently visited content. My recent series of articles on libvirt features have been particularly popular. It is absolutely non-negotiable that all existing links to these postings continue to work & don’t all end up broken. So the first step of the migration was to figure out how to export the content from Blogger into WordPress. The first thing I tried was WordPress’ own built-in import tool that can allegedly talk directly to Blogger and pull down all the postings & comments. The first problem I found with this, is that it only works if your content was hosted on Blogger. ie if you were using SFTP publishing it always reports ‘0 posts’. I temporarily update my blog settings to turn off SFTP and it at least detected all the posts at that point. I started the import process & it imported 3 posts and 70 comments and then gave up with no indication of what’s wrong. Tried again, and the same thing happened. Searching the WordPress forums it seems many people have hit this problem over the past 2 years with no reliable solution yet available.
Then I investigated whether Blogger had its own export capabilities. It does. It can export all your blog posts and comments in a single XML file. Unfortunately there is no apparent standard XML schema for blog import/export so there didn’t seem to be much use for this export capability & I didn’t fancy writing my own XSL transform to convert it to WordPress’ native XML import schema. The nice thing about Blogger and WordPress being so widely used on the web, is that if you have a problem, then the chances are that someone else has had the same problem already. In fact so many people have had this problem, that someone’s already written an tool to solve this, Google Blog Convertors
I tried downloaded it, fed it the Blogger exports and it generated some nice looking WordPress XML files. A closer look revealed one tiny flaw – it had unescaped a whole bunch of HTML tags in blog posts where I had been including snippets of example XML or HTML inside <pre> tags. Fortunately the code is all python and it was easy to find the bogus line of code “content = unescape(text)” and replace it with just “content = text“. After that the files imported into WordPress perfectly, preserving all formatting and comments.
Setting up URL redirects
Even though WordPress has a nice friendly URL scheme for articles based on their title, it is very slightly different from the scheme Blogger used for URLs. I was also merging several separate Blogger feeds into one, since WordPress has a nice categorization capability. It was thus inevitable that the URLs for all existing posts would have to change. The solution to this problem was pretty straightforward. Apache’s mod_rewrite engine can be told to load external files containing arbitrary key, value mappings, and then reference these maps in rewrite rules. It was a simple, albeit slightly tedious, process to write a map file that contained the old Blogger URL as the key and the new WordPress URL as the value. As an example, a tiny part of the map I created looks like this
/diary/2008/04/presentation-is-everything /posts/2008/04/21/presentation-is-everything
/diary/2008/06/red-hat-summit-2008 /posts/2008/06/18/red-hat-summit-2008
/diary/2009/12/using-qcow2-disk-encryption-with /posts/2009/12/02/using-qcow2-disk-encryption-with-libvirt-in-fedora-12
To make use of this map, just requires two rules in the httpd.conf file, one to load the map and the other to add a match for it. Those rules look like this
RewriteMap blogger txt:/etc/apache2/blogger-rewrite.txt
RewriteRule ^/personal(/diary/.*) ${blogger:$1} [L,R=permanent]
In summary, while the migration process from Blogger to WordPress was not entirely smooth, it went alot better than I expected it to. Any web user following an old link to a post on my site now gets a permanent redirect to the new location, so no important links were broken during the migration. The new site I have is soo much more flexible than the old one & the WordPress UI is very much nicer to use. Blogger’s UI is rather dated & not really on a par with the standard of Google’s other popular apps like GMail.
Just finished my talk at the Red Hat Summit on libvirt and virtualization tools. For those who are interested, the I’ve now posted the slides online.
CNet are running an article with a nice scary sounding headline
“Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion”
Pretty clearly trying to imply that open source software is a threat to the entire existence of the software industry. Don’t fall for such FUD. Just look at the headline from the other side of the fence
“Free Open Source Software Is Saving Customers $60 Billion”
Not nearly so scary sounding now. In fact it is probably quite appealing.
On the one hand, you have a small number of large software companies sitting on their monopolies and extorting cash through licensing fees. On the other hand, you have hundreds of thousands of companies saving money by using open source software, paying for services with tangible value for their business, rather than an arbitrary software “tax” (license fee). Open source software benefits the many, at the expense of the few. A worthy trade-off.
For some incomprehensible reason it has been decided that presenting Dilbert cartoon strips as a plain old image isn’t sexy enough. You now need a flash plugin to display the same old static image as before. Seriously, WTF.COM ?
The only positive, is that there is a now an RSS feed for the strips, which does have the static images inline to the feed. So now I can avoid the nauseating website completely and just read the strips from the comfort of LiFeRea.