388313 - Password manager should forget sort order on "Hide Passwords" if sort order was by password

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Password Manager, defect)

Description

[dolphinling]

2007-07-15 trunk nightly

The password manager lets its listings be sorted by password. When passwords are hidden, the sort order remains by password. This has the potential to leak information about the passwords to others, who can use the position of entries in the list to guess at the first few characters, or if some passwords in the list are known, narrow down what the others might be even more effectively.

I consider this bug relatively minor. It only affects people with a master password set (since otherwise an attacker can just click "show passwords") and it only works while the leaks any information in the rare case that the dialog is sorted by password, has passwords hidden, and then is left open (the sorting is reset when the dialog is closed). Still, it does have the potential to give away information about user passwords, so it should be fixed.

I'm marking this security sensitive only to make sure it gets seen by the security group and because I don't know any other way to do that. I don't think it needs to be confidential, and I expect it to be opened to general view.

Comment 1

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

I think this is a WONTFIX. It's a minor issue (as you note), and if the user is concerned about privacy they shouldn't be leaving this window open when they're not managing their passwords... OTOH, if they *are* managing their passwords, and use the Show/Hide button to just briefly show the password column, resetting the sort order would be an annoyance.

I'm going to add a comment to bug 318220, though. If we do add code to persist the sort order across window opens, the password column order probably shouldn't be preserved.