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Securing browsing data on xp netbook in case of theft.

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condensate
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 3:55 pm    Post subject: Securing browsing data on xp netbook in case of theft. Reply with quote

Hello. Firstly I am very sorry if this has been answered many times over, Ive had a decent effort to browse\ search forum but there is a lot on here.

I'm currently going round SE asia with a Samsung n140 netbook and using it to do my online banking as hope it should be more secure than using internet cafes in case of keylogging progs etc.

I dont have online baking passwords on netbook but I do use thunderbird\Firefox and chrome (email passwords remembered but not banking ones) and Im worried that if my laptop is stolen that by looking at my browsing history\cookies and with access to my emails that someone could engage in quite a fair bit of ID fraud and possibly access my online banking.

A solution would be have these programs not to store anything e.g history\cookies\passwords but Im lazy and its annoying having to put in email\fb\google etc passwords every time I use my PC.

Is there some way I can let these programs remember passwords\cookies but have some kind of master password that will be hard to bypass (I know windows xp login is not great and that a BIOS password can be bypassed by flicking a jumper). I could encrypt my entire windows partition but netbook is not that fast and I presume decrypting would take some time. Alternatively is it possible to install and run browsers\ thunderbird from an encrypted removable disc or only encrypt the folders of HD that contain this data?

Apologies for the length of post. Thanks for any help you can offer.

Specs:
Samsung n140 netbook
win XP Home edition SP3
Atom 1.6GHz N270
2Gb Ram
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capi
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 12:26 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi condensate, welcome to the forums!

I had just typed a huge answer but unfortunately I hit the back button by mistake before posting.... I will try to cover the most important topics and give you a couple of links for more information:

Firefox and Thunderbird do support master password encryption. You specify a master password, which is then used to encrypt all the stored passwords. The first time you need to access a stored password, Firefox/Thunderbird will ask you for the master password, and it will remember it until you close the program. You can enable this by going to Preferences -> Security -> Enable Master Password.

Of course, this only protects your Firefox and Thunderbird passwords. Stored cookies, for example, may be used to login into your email account, if you happened to activate the "remember me next time" checkbox or equivalent. You can protect your entire Firefox/Thunderbird profile, by using the builtin file- and folder-level encryption that Windows XP's NTFS filesystem provides. I myself don't use Windows very often, but it should be simple enough to encrypt a folder there -- just go to the folder's properties (right click on the folder from Windows Explorer -> Properties) and look for something like "make this private" or "encrypt this" or whatever. The encryption key is based on your user credentials as well as the password.

In Windows XP, the Firefox profile is stored by default inside the C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles folder -- it will be a folder with a randomly generated name, something like kmgytznr.default. You can encrypt the profile folder, or even change the profile's location, by editing the profiles.ini file located next to it. See http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Profiles for more information.

As for Thunderbird, by default the profile is stored in C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles. Again, you can change this location if you want -- see http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/profile for more information.

Finally, you can encrypt the full disk, using something like TrueCrypt, which is a strong and very well known open source encryption program. You just enter a password upon system boot, and then the disk is decrypted in real time, transparently for the operating system. You shouldn't notice much of a difference under normal use, in a relatively modern system like yours.

As a compromise, you could create an encrypted "container" using TrueCrypt, and mount that as your private data storage. A container is just a large encrypted file, which you can mount as a fake drive and it becomes just like a normal drive, where you can save and load data. Everything you save there is encrypted on the fly, and it is decrypted on the fly again when you read it.
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condensate
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 10:36 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hey Capi,

Thanks for replying in such helpful detail (twice!). I think Ill have a go at both of what you suggest ie allowing firefox\ thunderbird to use master passwords (prob ditching chrome) and Ill have a go at first encrypting whole drive (failing that will experiment with a container)

I have already partitioned 140Gb drive into 40Gb system partition and 100Gb media so of course will just partition the 40Gb which should help keep the decryption time down.

Thanks again, tomorrow Im going from Japan to Thailand so chance of having laptop pinched does increase quite a bit making this is a good time to improve security Smile
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capi
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 2:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

No problem, glad to be of help Smile

As for the decryption time of the drive, you don't need to worry about that too much. You see, the drive itself is never decrypted in full -- the data is decrypted on the fly, to RAM, as the operating system requests it. It works just like the container, except instead of storing data in an encrypted file, you're storing data in an encrypted partition.

Of course, the downside is the overhead while you're running the system, since every read from disk must go through TrueCrypt (to decrypt data from the drive), as well as every write (to encrypt data back into the drive). Still, this shouldn't be very noticeable on your system for normal use (web browsing, email, editing office documents, and so on).

The big drawback with using encryption is, of course, system recovery. If you forget the password, you're in trouble (that's the whole point). Also, full disk backup software such as Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image, which boot using a CD in order to backup your files, won't be able to recognize the files inside an encrypted disk (again, that's the whole point). They will still be able to backup the system, but the backup will take longer since they'll need to copy the entire partition (and of course, when you restore the partition, it will still be encrypted, so you'll need to know the password).

The TrueCrypt site has a wealth of documentation, which should help you along the way. I suggest you take a read at the introduction, the beginner's tutorial and the chapter on system encryption (which means encrypting the whole system, e.g. the Windows drive).

TrueCrypt has other, more advanced, features, such as hidden containers and even whole hidden operating systems, to provide you with plausible deniability. These are most likely overkill for your needs -- they're mostly for someone with a threat level that involves the risk of being captured, arrested or kidnapped and forced to reveal their password. You can basically have two passwords. If forced, you would reveal the "fake" password which only decrypts an outer container (where you could store some compromising photos or something to make it look real), but the real data would be in a hidden container inside that one, only accessible through the "real" password.
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