Firefox Master Password System Has Been Poorly Secured for the Past 9 Years, Researcher Says

For at past nine years, Mozilla has been using an insufficiently strong encryption mechanism for the "master password" feature.

Both Firefox and Thunderbird allow users to set up a "master password" through their settings panel. This master password plays the role of an encryption key that is used to encrypt each password string the user saves in his browser or email client.

Experts have lauded the feature because up until that point browsers would store passwords locally in cleartext, leaving them vulnerable to malware or attackers with physical access to a victim's computer