Inserting text from a C# WinForms application into a web browser textbox

Question

I'm currently working on a WinForms application that I'm hoping will allow users to enter stored passwords into a web browser without a keylogger being able to see the password. I've got the storing part completed, but I can't figure out how to insert the password into a browser without using either the clipboard or .NET's SendKeys class, both of which can be seen by most keyloggers.

I looked into using Windows messages to do this, but, from what I understand, you need to know the hWnd of a control in order to send it a Windows message. Unfortunately, it appears that web browsers do not use hWnds for individual textbox controls.

I know there has to be a way to do this. In Notepad++, for example, you can drag text into a web browser textbox and the text doesn't show up in keyloggers. Same goes for Neo's SafeKeys. Anyone have any ideas on a general approach to doing this? Thanks so much.

What happens when you drag and drop notepad text, is a temporary copy/paste (just like ctrl+c / ctrl+v) and has nothing to do with what you are trying to do. — ESD
– ESD, Commented Feb 13, 2015 at 13:27
I'm talking about dragging text from Notepad++ to a textbox in a browser. That doesn't get added to the clipboard, or, if it does, it does so in a way that prevents the keyloggers I've tested from detecting it. — Jeremy Jensen
– Jeremy Jensen, Commented Feb 13, 2015 at 16:32
Yes, this is a windows feature not notepad++. You can do the same in other applications. And it does use the copy paste mechanism. You can use this mechanism programmatically but you can't tell it to paste in a password field of a browser since windows doesn't know where this field is. Which is why you need the webdriver library. Hope this helps to understand! — ESD
– ESD, Commented Feb 13, 2015 at 16:48

ESD · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-12 17:07:18Z

1

What you want is a WebDriver Library. Unfortunately .net does not have plenty of good ones. You can take a look at WatiN or selenium

From what I understand watin isn't supported anymore and is not multi-browser compatible.

Here is an example of what you can do with selenium

using (var driver = new ChromeDriver())
{
    driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://testing-ground.scraping.pro/login");
    var userNameField = driver.FindElementById("usr");
    var userPasswordField = driver.FindElementById("pwd");
    var loginButton = driver.FindElementByXPath("//input[@value='Login']");

    userNameField.SendKeys("admin");
    userPasswordField.SendKeys("12345");
    loginButton.Click();
}

I image you can link your driver to an existing opened browser

If you are able to run ruby on the computers I would recommend using Watir and running the ruby script doing the web manipulation from the c# using processes.

answered Feb 12, 2015 at 17:07

ESD

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1 Comment

Jeremy Jensen Over a year ago

This looks very promising! Thank you so much. I'll look into it.

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