Profile decryption problem after last update
-
@georgep said in Profile decryption problem after last update:
What if Viv is your only installed browser? Then when you see the "Who's using ..." and "data loss" windows and think, like me, oh gosh I need to research this --- you'll need to install another browser to do it.
Maybe you may use a Guest Profile, as I am doing now.
-
Having just experienced this on a relative's LinuxMint computer I can confirm that the message "Decryption failed: risk of data loss" appears when Vivaldi has been installed from a .deb which then installs the repo in Software sources. So the updates are handled in the same way as debian/Ubuntu/Mint updates.
-
@syklist Can be related to switching between GNOME keyrings and KDE wallet, using XFCE, broken profile data. I do not know.
-
@DoctorG
The user did nothing other than apply the updates offered by the LinuxMint updater. As far as I am aware LinuxMint XFCE edition uses the GNOME keyrings and XFCE is the only desktop environment installed on the user's PC.I have just updated my PinePhone running mobian/Phosh and BOTH Vivaldi stable and Vivaldi snapshot are exhibiting the same problem, the profile chooser comes up.
Apart from doing a standard sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade which among other things updated both snapshot and stable I have not knowingly made any other changes.
Vivaldi asks for the keyring password which I enter and then I can get no further than the Profile chooser.
Is this a Vivaldi bug? Or a debian bug?
-
@DoctorG said in Profile decryption problem after last update:
@syklist Can be related to switching between GNOME keyrings and KDE wallet, using XFCE, broken profile data. I do not know.
It seems to me to be the case that the most recent updates of stable and snapshot, and updates to the debian based systems have provoked this problem.
Neither myself nor the other user I mentioned use sync. The devices are single user devices and no changes other than updates of Vivaldi and the system have triggered the problem in our cases.
I will not be upgrading Vivaldi on any of my other devices until I have a way of solving this problem.
-
@syklist said in Profile decryption problem after last update:
It seems to me to be the case that the most recent updates of stable and snapshot, and updates to the debian based systems have provoked this problem.
The reason this warning has appeared recently is that the dialog IS new!
Before this dialog was added one would happily(?) switch between environments (whether Linux Window managers, or different machines) trying to reuse the same profile in both/all environments, and thus losing all your login cookies and other information that is stored encrypted locally on your diskdrive (Sync is not involved here) because the encryption key was lost by the environment change. This dialog stops you before the damage can be done, asks if you really want to wipe your data.
-
@yngve said in Profile decryption problem after last update:
@syklist said in Profile decryption problem after last update:
It seems to me to be the case that the most recent updates of stable and snapshot, and updates to the debian based systems have provoked this problem.
The reason this warning has appeared recently is that the dialog IS new!
Before this dialog was added one would happily(?) switch between environments (whether Linux Window managers, or different machines) trying to reuse the same profile in both/all environments, and thus losing all your login cookies and other information that is stored encrypted locally on your diskdrive (Sync is not involved here) because the encryption key was lost by the environment change. This dialog stops you before the damage can be done, asks if you really want to wipe your data.
Both my PinePhone and my elderly relative's LinuxMint laptop have only one desktop environment installed.
Phosh in the case of my PinePhone and XFCE in the case of the elderly relative's laptop.
So what is causing the profile chooser to be triggered?
-
@syklist said in Profile decryption problem after last update:
So what is causing the profile chooser to be triggered?
That dialog is unrelated to the "decryption failed" dialog
See https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/796939 for what is triggering that
-
@syklist If you are seeing both the "decryption failed" and then the "Profile chooser" without wanting it, you have two different problems.
Concentrate on one of them at a time; and the "decryption failed" should be the priority.
-
It's a bit late now for me, I guess that I have more things to add to tomorrow's already very long to-do list.
Anyway, at least I have discovered a good reason to keep Firefox installed on my devices.
Time to do a quick back up of bookmarks and passwords from my more important devices before Vivaldi/the OS get updated.
-
@syklist As mentioned earlier: If you see the "decryption failed" dialog it means that the selected profile's encrypted data (which include passwords, login cookies, etc) cannot be decrypted.
The normal reason for that is that the profile has been moved from one computer to another, or from one user on the computer to another user. On Linux it can also involve switching Window Managers, while still being used by the same user. That last problem is really something that should be solved by the Window Manager development teams.
In those cases, the problem is solved by closing the browser, returning the profile to the original machine/user/Window Manager. Or, if there is no way back (e.g. new machine) just continue and lose the encrypted data, some of which (like passwords) can be recovered from Sync if they have been synced.
A different reason is more difficult to solve, quite likely impossible without restoring from a backup, is that the encrypted profile data files has been modified in a way that breaks the encryption.
-
@yngve said in Profile decryption problem after last update:
The normal reason for that is that the profile has been moved from one computer to another, or from one user on the computer to another user. On Linux it can also involve switching Window Managers, while still being used by the same user. That last problem is really something that should be solved by the Window Manager development teams.
I have read this and noted that none of the normal causes are present in the cases that I have very recently observed. https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/troubleshoot/decryption-failed-risk-of-data-loss-error-dialog-on-startup/
I have experienced this problem now on three devices. Two of them shared the same initial disc image created over 2 years ago but with their own discrete Vivaldi config folder. The third is an unrelated device.
The problems appear to have started after updating the OS (debian based) and Vivaldi.
All devices are single user in all senses of the word. There is no switching between users on the devices.
No user passwords have been changed in the last couple of months.
All have only one desktop environment installed and have never had secondary desktop environments installed.
All devices require the user to log in on start up which normally ensures that the Gnome key manager is started up on boot.
All affected instances of Vivaldi stable and snapshot have one profile - Person 1.
The profile folders on each device are the ones generated when Vivaldi started up for the first time. Thus none of the profile folders have been copied.
No known manual changes to these profile folders have been made.
Sync is not used on any of the Vivaldi instances.
All devices affected (so far) are debian based.
All devices have been updated using each distribution's standard tools for updating (apt/apt-get LinuxMint updater).
So none of the above causes you mentioned seem to be relevent in the cases that I have observed.
EDIT: I have just updated this computer, Raspberry Pi OS ARM 32 legacy (debian bullseye) and Vivaldi stable has updated without any issues.
EDIT CORRECTION: the three devices are mobile devices, 2 laptops and a PinePhone so can sleep. However, there have been no problems up to now with corruption of discs that I am aware of and only after updates in the last couple of days have we started getting messages that the profiles are corrupted.
-
@syklist said in Profile decryption problem after last update:
The problems appear to have started after updating the OS (debian based)
Which may have change something under the hood, that affect the user account's keystore, or something about the Window Manager, sufficiently that it is detectable as preventing successful decryption of the Vivaldi profile's encrypted data.
I am not a Linux expert, so I have no idea what might have changed.
-
I got fed up after spending a couple of hours trying to work out how to fix the problem. The GNOME keystore is running on my PinePhone and is unlocked. Vivaldi seems to not be aware of this.
So I bit the bullet and started up Vivaldi snapshot on my PinePhone accepting data loss. All that seems to have gone is logins and passwords. Everything else, theme and other customisations, bookmarks, etc seems to be intact. Fortunately I only had a couple of logins saved to the snapshot version of Vivaldi. I try the same with vivaldi-stable as I rely on having both functioning properly.
Not knowing why this happened is very disconcerting and this is the first time I can recall that I have had such problems with Vivaldi. All I can do is hope that it does not happen again.
-
@syklist the reason is a changing key store selection or compatibility.
The native access to
gnome-keyringwas removed fromChromiuma while ago.
It now usesgnome-libsecreton platforms that identify as GNOME-like.Using a DBus service has the potential to introduce another moving target into an already brittle pipeline.
There are (apparently) 2 ways of opting out on
this madnesssecure password storage:- start Chormium browsers with
--password-store=basic - there is a code path to disable encryption backends, but I was not able to trigger it.
Unless you set a master password for
Firefox, this can still be considered equally secure (for sane use cases). - start Chormium browsers with
-
Thanks for the reply, I tried to set the PinePhone to use gnome-libsecret but apparently the command was not valid. I can try again. It is a bit strange as Vivaldi stable and snapshot have been working fine up to the point I and my elderly relative started experiencing problems.
The Profile Choose reared its ugly head this morning on the PinePhone again on both stable and snapshot.
I carried on accepting data loss and in the case of Vivaldi-stable I merely had to add an IM login and password with all other settings having been preserved.
In the case of snapshot, again, all settings except passwords are preserved but snapshot will no longer save passwords. Even when I deleted all cookies related to the relevant domain. I had this problem ages ago with Chromium but I cannot remember what the solution was.
I will have to delete the snapshot profile again and set up my theme and other settings again.
All a bit tiresome.
-
@syklist to restore password storage, it might be required to delete the
Login Datafile in the profile folder.Chromium will likely refuse to update this file as long as encryption selection is deemed inconsistent (file vs. environment).
