Journal babbage's Journal: "software security device" ? 5
Dear aunty Slashdot,
Does anyone here understand how Mozilla / Firebird's current security module system works? In particular, does anyone know what's up with the "software security device"?
My fiancee's computer -- a WinXP laptop with no user account passwords (it's just two of us using it, and we trust each other) -- keeps throwing these annoying dialog windows demanding that you "Please enter the master password for the Software Security Device." whenever you take Firebird to a web page with a username & password.
The catch though is that no password I can think of as a likely candidate works. A bit of Googling points to a couple of semi-promising solutions, and while all the ones I've found so far talk about Linux, the general description of the issue seems to be spot on. The workaround -- enter the Linux login account -- doesn't seem to apply here: there is no Windows system login for this account, and leaving the password field blank doesn't work either.
Following on from the Mandrake advice, I tried opening up Firebird's dialog window for the security device settings (go to Tools -> Options, then Advanced -> Certificates -> Manage Security Devices [there's a disclaimer that this is subject to move around in future releases]). This brings up a cryptic dialog window with the "Device Manager" (yay! trusted computing IN OUR TIME), with a hierarchy of cryptically labelled "Security Modules and Devices" on the left (e.g. NSS Internal PKCS #11 Module -> Software Security Device), some cryptic "details" and "values" in the middle panel, and a column of cryptic buttons over on the right. (For a crypto system, they've got being cryptic nailed
With those right-side buttons, three seem to do with managing what appears to be the equivalent of OSX's Keychain ("Login", "Change Password", and "Load"), but again if you click on any of those you get asked for the master password -- the lack thereof being the rabbit I'm chasing down this hole. There's also a button labelled "Enable FIPS", but there seems to be no indication of what happens when you click it or what FIPS stands for (if in fact it's an acronym in the first place).
Hilariously, there's also a "Help" button on the bottom of the dialog, but it doesn't seem to be hooked up to anything. Har har har.
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So, the QUESTION:
Where did this thing come from, and how can one either fix or disable it? If it's like Keychain, and provides some kind of encrypted safekeeping for sensitive form data, I have no problem with doing it "right" and working logged into the subsystem. As it is now though, it's just getting in the way, and I can't figure out how to reliably get it to go away and stay away.
I say "reliably", because on some sites I get the dialog almost every time I follow a link, while on others it's just at the initial login -- I assume that this has to do with how accounts are being managed on the server, but haven't been ablle to pin down what's going on there. One annoyance per site I could deal with, but repeating it all the time like this is really getting on my nerves...
Any help wins an ice cream cone -- TIA
how I set up firebird on a win2k box (Score:2)
I set up Firebird like this
Firebird --+
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+firebird_version_061
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+firebird_version_070
and then drag a short cut from the version I find with least bugs. For your machine download/reintall an earl
Re:how I set up firebird on a win2k box (Score:2)
Makes sense. The thing is, this has been going on for a while now -- since the middle of the summer or so -- and I've been more or less keeping up with the nightly builds for a while now (a year or so? since Firebird/Phoenix 0.4 or so, whenever that was). Aside from this one bug, the nightly releases generally just seem to get more robust, so I stopped with the "multiple versions / one shortcut" trick out of concern for dwindling disc space a while ago.
My hunch is that some aspect of the user profiles on
Re:how I set up firebird on a win2k box (Score:2)
did you have a previously installed version of Mozilla *before* you put on Firebird? Could be the Moz settings might be hanging over?
Re:how I set up firebird on a win2k box (Score:2)
look at install notes for 0.7 (Score:2)
PLEASE NOTE: You should create a new profile for Mozilla Firebird 0.7. To create a new profile, start Mozilla Firebird by running MozillaFirebird.exe -p and click on the "Create Profile" button.
and
New password manager - meaning it could have bugs.
also checked out mozillazine forums [mozillazine.org] and found this