Chrome's Hidden Password Feature is ****ed

Posted 01/29/2009 at 8:00am | by Paul Lilly

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Google's rap sheet when it comes to goofy exploits gives us pause to wonder if the company might be spending too much time concentrating on Cloud computing and not enough on security fundamentals. Back in July of last year, a SecurTeam blog exposed a Google Calendar flaw which made it possible to expose any Gmail user's real name with minimal effort. More recently, an exploit in Gmail allowing hackers to redirect your email was discovered. Now someone has stumbled onto an interesting vulnerability in Google's Chrome browser.

When you visit a site with an http password protected directory -- or try logging into your router, such as 192.168.1.1 for Linksys owners -- an Authentication Required pop-up appears asking for your for your login credentials. Your password should look something like ••••••••, but according to NeoBlog user tekmosis, if you let Chrome save your credentials to auto-fill the form, the next time you log in, copying and pasting the hidden password into a plain text application will reveal the actual ASCII characters.

We put tekmosis' discovered exploit to the test and as it turns out, you don't even need to have Chrome save anything. We tried logging into our router, typed our password, and it was immediately revealed when we copied/pasted it into Notepad.

While it might take a little work on the part of a hacker to take advantage of this vulnerability, it's one that should never have existed in the first place. You could make an argument that all exploits should never have existed, but this one just seems like a particularly glaring oversight.