BrowserIdP

Overview

BrowserIdP is an experimental stab at implementing a Mozilla Persona Identity Provider as a Firefox extension. Note that it does some unsafe things; for example, it can cause crashes if you attempt to quit while it’s off doing things.

Using the extension

1. Grab a Firefox mozilla-central nightly (should be on track for Firefox 18 or higher).

2. Go to about:config and set dom.identity.enabled to true

3. Install the extension (pack it up in an XPI, or using a proxy file).

4. Go to addon options, and click on the Generate button

5. Enter the your hostname when prompted (i.e. the part after @ in your desired identities)

6. Click on Copy JSON after a key has been generated

7. Upload the contents of your clipboard as /.well-known/browserid on your server (i.e. https://example.com/.well-known/browserid).

8. Login to a Persona-based site, such as http://123done.org/

The keys are stored in the Firefox/Gecko Login Manager; filter for "x-browseridp:" in your saved passwords to see them.

Known issues

These should go into the github issues list, but in the mean time…​

• Need to do the NSS shutdown lock stuff (i.e. will probably crash on shutdown if it’s attempting to process something)

• Key version upgrades (e.g. importing from an old version with different key formats; addon updates)

• Copy JSON needs to be asynchronous (the base64 to decimal conversion is dumb)