Wesabe's automatic banking Firefox extension [LWN.net]

Wesabe has announced the availability of an open source Firefox extension to help with online banking. "Setting up Wesabe accounts for banks that provide automatic data downloads, including American Express, Chase and USAA, only takes seconds -- members simply need to enter their username and password. The extension auto-records a login and download, and then plays it back as frequently as the member wants updated data. The extension works equally as well for banks that don't provide automatic downloads -- members use the extension to 'record' an actual download session from their bank Web site, a process that typically takes between one and two minutes." One can only hope that this source gets audited well; it would be an optimal trojan horse platform, and is sure to be a cracker target as well.

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Wesabe's automatic banking Firefox extension

Posted Jul 25, 2007 22:42 UTC (Wed) by emerose (guest, #46431) [Link]

Hey --
I work at Wesabe, and just wanted to chime in here:

>One can only hope that this source gets audited well; it would be an
>optimal trojan horse platform, and is sure to be a cracker target as well.

We totally agree. We put the extension through a pretty intense internal code review before we launched it, and we make sure to sign every extension to ensure they aren't modified in transit. That said, one of the main reasons we made the extension Open Source is that we're hoping to take advantage of Linus' Law (given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.)

Anyway; anyone who wants to take a look under the hood can just browse to ~/.mozilla/firefox/<somerandomstring>.default/extensions/wesup@wesabe.com/ and poke around. Questions and comments (and patches!) are welcome -- just send us a note at support@wesabe.com.