Hacking is scary to most people, but I think people should be aware how much of their data is accessible and easily accessible. Storing your passwords is dangerous.
However, the convenience of doing so makes things overwhelmingly easy. Also, storing your passwords always means your stored passwords are as secure as your user account. You need to make sure that when you login no one sees or knows your user password, because everything that is encrypted is so with your credentials. If your credentials are easy to "hack", so are all of your saved passwords.
So, if you think: "This is too dangerous. I want more security for my passwords!", you will have to store your passwords in a password database like Keepass. However, you still have the same problem because you have to remember a master password which is very secure. So, I believe storing your passwords encrypted with your user credentials is secure enough. If we were paranoid about everything, we wouldn't get anything done.
On the other hand, if you loose your password database in whatever form it is, it is a major hassle to press "forgot password" on all those websites and creating a new password which has to be remembered again and also has to be secure.
So, I was motivated to find a way to store my Chrome passwords in Keepass or somewhere else secure, so in case of a crash, I would be able to restore reasonably quickly and convenient. For that I needed an automatic way to find and store all those passwords in Chrome.
Without further ado here part of the solution:
You need a tool called secret-tool. Just typing
secret-tool
reveals which package needs to be installed and how:
sudo apt-get install libsecret-tools
After a bit of trial and error, I figured out how to see all my Chrome passwords and from the command line! This doesn't mean that other people can see this information, because, as I said, the passwords are encrypted with your login data. However, it can be useful for yourself. You can like this automate putting your passwords into a Keepass database for example.
Now, without further ado, the magic command:
secret-tool search --all submit_element ''|less
You can then pipe this command into a file in your encrypted Private directory (maybe more in another post).
secret-tool search --all \
submit_element '' \
> ~/Private/passwords.txt
WARNING: Absolutely make sure this directory is encrypted! I store the encryped version in my Dropbox, so not even Dropbox employees can read them.
How to encrypt your files in this directory is possibly the topic of another post.
If you would like to see more on this topic, please let me know in a comment.