<story><title>Showing stored passwords – Tim Berners-Lee</title><url>http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2013Aug/0020.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jellicle</author><text>And this is why I don&amp;#x27;t use Chrome, nor recommend it to anyone.&lt;p&gt;The dimwit Chrome developers continue their dumb insistence that penetrable security shouldn&amp;#x27;t exist.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Bathroom doors shouldn&amp;#x27;t have locks; someone could just kick the door in and then where would you be!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Houses shouldn&amp;#x27;t have locks; you&amp;#x27;ve got glass windows, don&amp;#x27;t you?!  It&amp;#x27;s a false sense of security!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Prisons shouldn&amp;#x27;t have 20-foot walls; Home Depot has 21 foot ladders, don&amp;#x27;t they?!  Lex Luthor escaped via helicopter!  It&amp;#x27;s a false sense of security!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Bicycles shouldn&amp;#x27;t have locks; there are bolt cutters with five-foot handles, aren&amp;#x27;t there?!  It&amp;#x27;s a false sense of security!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Of course in the real world, where Chrome developers do not live, we use locks in all these cases.  There&amp;#x27;s a combination of social signalling (this is mine; do not disturb it) as well as legal signalling (locked means an affirmative action must be taken to break the security, which is punishable; unlocked is not punishable) as well as a substantial amount of actual security (the reality is not everyone carries five-foot bolt cutters, even if some people do).&lt;p&gt;Maybe I can put it another way: Android, up through 4.2, only contemplated a single user per tablet.  So if you gave your kids (or anyone) the tablet to play with, they had FULL and unrestricted access to your Gmail account, Google Play account, and so on.  Someone, eventually, slapped some sense into the Android developers and now Android 4.3 has restricted profiles where you can let the kids play games without giving them access to your Google accounts.&lt;p&gt;That someone needs to get their slapping gloves and wander over to the Chrome development team...</text></comment>
<story><title>Showing stored passwords – Tim Berners-Lee</title><url>http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2013Aug/0020.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>spinchange</author><text>The purpose of a master password is not to provide perfect security or a false sense thereof. The purpose is to impede an &lt;i&gt;unskilled attacker&lt;/i&gt; who has only momentary access (like the amount of time it takes to type chrome:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;settings&amp;#x2F;passwords on a temporarily unattended machine) and mitigate the severity of what can be done by an &lt;i&gt;unskilled attacker&lt;/i&gt; in the event of such a short breach.&lt;p&gt;It might be proper security engineering practice, but it strikes me as being totally out-of-touch with regular humans and mere mortal users to insist that once &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; attacker has access for &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; duration, you&amp;#x27;re completely hosed anyway, so why not make it easy for them.</text></comment>