1968517 - Firefox Password Generator suggests the same password repeatedly for multiple users

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1925073

(Toolkit :: Password Manager, defect)

Description

[Zio3D]

Attachment: test-password.php

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:138.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/138.0

Steps to reproduce:

While using Firefox's built-in password generator to create secure passwords for new users, I noticed that the generated password is often the same across multiple registrations. Despite expecting a unique password for each user, Firefox suggests the previously generated password instead of creating a new one. This behavior persists even when registering multiple users consecutively, making it unclear whether this is an intended feature or an issue with entropy in the password generation process. To test this, I used the attached PHP script to simulate multiple user registrations and observed the repeated password issue.

1. Used the PHP test script (provided attached) to simulate multiple user registrations.
2. Opened the test page in Firefox (the page must be uploaded to a PHP webserver).
3. Entered a username and clicked on the password field.
4. Selected "Suggest a strong password..." and then "Use a securely generated password".
5. Submitted the form.
6. Clicked the button "Try with a new user", which reloads the form without parameters to simulate another registration.
7. Repeated steps 3-6 multiple times with different usernames.

Actual results:

The password suggested by Firefox remains the same across multiple user registrations. It does not generate a new password each time, effectively reusing the last one generated.

Expected results:

Firefox should generate a unique, random password for each user registration instead of suggesting the same one repeatedly. It should include sufficient entropy and possibly a time-based factor to ensure uniqueness.

Comment 1

[Zio3D]

Attachment: The video shows that Firefox suggests the same password to me

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Toolkit::Password Manager' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 3

[Johannes]

Hi,

thank you for the bug report! This is a known limitation of how we currently handle generated password persistence between page navigation. We are aware that this can be improved, and there is a meta bug for this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1915598

For now you can restart your Firefox if you are creating multiple passwords on the same page.

Comment 4

[Zio3D]

Ok,
Now I follow 1915598.

Thank you.
Davide.