ImperialViolet

So, yesterday, I utterly forgot a password which I use several times a day. I'd typed it twice in the morning and, about mid afternoon, just stopped. This password was so instinctive I just couldn't believe that I couldn't type it, but no amount of frustration over the next 30 minutes changed that.

But I remembered that I was logged in using it in a Firefox session which was running. So I managed to extract the password from the memory of the firefox process (more on that later) and, although I now had the password, it didn't make any sense. There was no “Oh! That's it!” moment, and no muscle memory when I tried to type it.

So I was safe, but a little bit freaked out. A couple of hours later (after a beer, which should have been the obvious solution all along) I sat down at the computer and unlocked the screensaver without even thinking about it. (The screensaver needs the same password). I took several minutes before I realised and now ever having forgotten the password seems as impossible as ever having known it did a couple of hours ago.

I guess it's only going to be a few short years until I start walking into rooms having forgotten why I went there in the first place.

But anyway, I wrote up a very hacky program for extracting passwords from the memory of a running Firefox process - see the comments at the top for limitations.