Protect your Firefox Profile

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Osiris

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A Firefox profile stores all personal information such as bookmarks and passwords in it. Everyone who is starting up Firefox with that profile is able to use your saved passwords and cookies as well which is a security risk if you ask me. One way to overcome this would be to protect the Firefox profile folder by moving it to a location that is not accessible to anyone except you.

I did this by moving the profile to my encrypted hard drive. The hard drive is encrypted using True Crypt and the profile can only be accessed if I provide the security key to decrypt the hard drive. Other means are theoretically possible as well, use a portable device that has to be plugged in before you can use the profile.

Moving a profile to another location is not difficulty at all. Close all instances of Firefox and locate your profile folder. This is usually in Document and Settings under Application Date, Mozilla, Firefox, Profiles of the user who is logged into windows currently.

Move the complete folder to a different location. Open up profiles.ini afterwards (located in Firefox in Document and Settings). Change the path= parameter to the new location of your profile and change the parameter IsRelative=1 to 0.

Restart Firefox to see if the changes have been made. If all your bookmarks for instance load fine the changes have been successful. If that is not the case double-check the path parameter in profiles.ini.


http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/27/protect-your-firefox-profile/
 
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