Disable browser 'Save Password' functional

Question

One of the joys of working for a government healthcare agency is having to deal with all of the paranoia around dealing with PHI (Protected Health Information). Don't get me wrong, I'm all for doing everything possible to protect people's personal information (health, financial, surfing habits, etc.), but sometimes people get a little too jumpy.

Case in point: One of our state customers recently found out that the browser provides the handy feature to save your password. We all know that it has been there for a while and is completely optional and is up to the end user to decide whether or not it is a smart decision to use or not. However, there is a bit of an uproar at the moment and we are being demanded to find a way to disable that functionality for our site.

Question: Is there a way for a site to tell the browser not to offer to remember passwords? I've been around web development a long time but don't know that I have come across that before.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Well, its a very old post, but still I will give my solution, which my team had been trying to achieve for long. We just added a new input type="password" field inside the form and wrapped it in div and made the div hidden. Made sure that this div is before the actual password input. This worked for us and it didn't gave any Save Password option

Plunk - http://plnkr.co/edit/xmBR31NQMUgUhYHBiZSg?p=preview

HTML:

<form method="post" action="yoururl">
      <div class="hidden">
        <input type="password"/>
      </div>
      <input type="text" name="username" placeholder="username"/>
      <input type="password" name="password" placeholder="password"/>
    </form>

CSS:

.hidden {display:none;}

Answer 2

Markus raised a great point. I decided to look up the autocomplete attribute and got the following:

The only downside to using this attribute is that it is not standard (it works in IE and Mozilla browsers), and would cause XHTML validation to fail. I think this is a case where it's reasonable to break validation however. (source)

So I would have to say that although it doesn't work 100% across the board it is handled in the major browsers so its a great solution.

Answer 3

autocomplete="off" does not work for disabling the password manager in Firefox 31 and most likely not in some earlier versions, too.

Checkout the discussion at mozilla about this issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=956906

We wanted to use a second password field to enter a one-time password generated by a token. Now we are using a text input instead of a password input. :-(

Answer 4

I'm not sure if it'll work in all browsers but you should try setting autocomplete="off" on the form.

<form id="loginForm" action="login.cgi" method="post" autocomplete="off">

The easiest and simplest way to disable Form and Password storage prompts and prevent form data from being cached in session history is to use the autocomplete form element attribute with value "off".

From http://developer.mozilla.org/En/How_to_Turn_Off_Form_Autocompletion

Some minor research shows that this works in IE to but I'll leave no guarantees ;)

@Joseph: If it's a strict requirement to pass XHTML validation with the actual markup (don't know why it would be though) you could theoretically add this attribute with javascript afterwards but then users with js disabled (probably a neglectable amount of your userbase or zero if your site requires js) will still have their passwords saved.

Example with jQuery:

$('#loginForm').attr('autocomplete', 'off');

Answer 5

Just so people realise - the 'autocomplete' attribute works most of the time, but power users can get around it using a bookmarklet.

Having a browser save your passwords actually increases protection against keylogging, so possibly the safest option is to save passwords in the browser but protect them with a master password (at least in Firefox).

Answer 6

Facing the same HIPAA issue and found a relatively easy solution,

1. Create a hidden password field with the field name as an array.

   <input type="password" name="password[]" style="display:none" />
   

2. Use the same array for the actual password field.

   <input type="password" name="password[]" />
   

The browser (Chrome) may prompt you to "Save password" but regardless if the user selects save, the next time they login the password will auto-populate the hidden password field, the zero slot in the array, leaving the 1st slot blank.

I tried defining the array, such as "password[part2]" but it still remembered. I think it throws it off if it's an unindexed array because it has no choice but to drop it in the first spot.

Then you use your programming language of choice to access the array, PHP for example,

echo $_POST['password'][1];