I run Firefox and Tbird off a thumb drive and recently I decided to encrypt in case I lost a drive.I installed TrueCrypt on a thumb and then installed Firefox and Tbird inside a file container, however the browser was so slow as to be nonusable. A friend at Mozzilazine suggested encrypting the profile alone, any opinions and/or suggestions.
Thanks
Visit the Community page
Join our forums
Subscribe to our email newsletter
Subscribe with RSS
Follow us on BlueSky
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on LinkedIn
Follow us on Mastodon
Follow us on Twitter
You won't be able to do that due to the way it's all set up and the way TrueCrypt works. (This is possibly worthwhile thinking about later but not at the moment.)
I am a Christian and a developer and moderator here.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” – Proverbs 15:1
I appreciate the quick reply. Any other suggestions on password protecting my browser/email client on a flash drive?
Thanks
Firefox has a "master password" option which I use. Granted, all the data files are still human-readable, but it would deter a casual user from snooping around your password protected sites.
I assume Thunderbird has the same since it's running on a similar engine.
Not really much of an option I know, but better than nothing I suppose.
Another option for Firefox would be to never store any passwords in Firefox itself and use KeePass to remember all your username/passwords. It means that you might have to run KeePass every time you run Firefox (Unless you'll be visiting sites you don't need username/password for), but at least your usernames and passwords will be securely encrypted in the KeePass database.
Do you need to keep history and search form data? You can always have that deleted on Firefox exit too.
Incidentally, I've run browsers (and other applications) from encrypted volumes/files before and not noticed any extreme poor performance issues. I typically would use OnTheFlyEncryption (OTFE) and create an encrypted file to mount as a volume.
OTFE is not a configuration, it is a function.
There is nothing you can do within the configuration that will stop the app from saving almost the entire content of your profile to disk (or flash) in plain text that is easily accessed by anyone else.
That means that any methods that could help with securing the data in it will involved something other than a configuration tweak.
Sounds like you want something at the hardware level rather than the software level. There are software applications that utilize special hardware to encrypt data such as those laptops that use Biometrics (fingerprint authentication)
OTFE or rather FreeOTFE is nothing more than a software alternative to TrueCrypt. I've used it, it works. Yes, you can see that there is some kind of data file, unless you can break the encryption then you have no way of knowing the contents of that file.
Only secure step beyond that, that I can think of would be to keep that encrypted file (or volume, whichever you prefer) on a removable media such as a USB drive and keep that drive under lock and key (in a safe for example).
You reach a point where the best way to secure a computer is to use no computer at all.