Kwallet update to v. 5.98 caused lost passwords in Chromium/Chrome

archdub · 2022-09-12 19:15:45

Today I updated one of my desktops, the last time had been 14 days ago. I started Chromium and my stored passwords had disappeared. Has anybody else got this issue?

I was not logged into any google account. The passwords that disappeared included Yahoo and Facebook. V. 105.0.5195.102-2 is the latest.

Last edited by archdub (2022-09-13 18:20:12)

graysky · 2022-09-12 20:26:36

Cannot confirm. In any case, backups of home dir or ~/.config are something you should have. If not, good lesson to do them. If you're new to them, highly recommend backintime.

seth · 2022-09-12 21:18:17

Do you specify https://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-c … word-store ?
Which one do you expect to use (DE dependent)?
If kwallet or gnome-keyring, do those clients still hold the passwords?

mpan · 2022-09-12 21:36:49

I do not use Chrome(-ium), so I can’t help directly. However, if seth is right regarding the browser using a system-provided keyring, you may inspect GNOME Keyring using extra/seahorse and KWallet’s contents using extra/kwalletmanager. That should at least let you recover the passphrases.

archdub · 2022-09-12 22:17:15

Thanks everyone for all the helpful replies.

@graysky: yes, I do have a backup although I wanted to see if it was just me that had this problem or other people had. If many people had I was thinking of downgrading chromium before trying the profile from backup.

@seth: so many command line parameters in chromium! :-O That reminds me that I used to be prompted to open the wallet when I started chromium (and maybe chrome too), but I stop seeing these prompts some weeks or months ago even though all was working fine until today's update.

@mpan: thanks, I will try them.

Anyway, I have several browsers and browser versions, and for one of the firefox versions two profiles, in perhaps a futile attempt to lessen the chances of being fingerprinted, and because I have some profiles with more strict security than others (which makes them unusable with some websites). Maybe the best for me is to stop using chromium and instead create a few more profiles for firefox.

Last edited by archdub (2022-09-12 23:29:04)

archdub · 2022-09-13 18:00:32

I made progress investigating this issue. After tests I confirmed that it was kwallet v. 5.98 that caused me problems. V. 5.97 is fine. The visible difference seems to be that when I start Chrome and Chromium with 5.97 there is a pop-up window asking me to open the wallet, whereas that does not happen with 5.98. No idea why. I don't know if this is a bug, feature, or just change of functionality. I am however surprised why I am the only one getting this issue, and for me it happened with both chromium and google-chrome (the latter from AUR).

seth · 2022-09-13 20:20:08

Can you explicitly run the kwallet client?

archdub · 2022-09-13 21:26:57

With 'ps' I could see that kwalletd was running. I tried to run kwalletd-query however I needed to pass the name of the wallet as parameter and could not figure out what that name was. So I installed kwalletmanager and it told me kwallet was running and I could see the passwords stored in it.

seth · 2022-09-13 21:49:14

Run "dbus-monitor", then to open the wallet w/ chromium (start chromium and access the passwords) and see which function it tries to use (and whether that function is still there with 5.98)
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=458318 looks like it could cause trouble

archdub · 2022-09-13 22:02:41

Thanks, I will give it a try tomorrow, that desktop is in another location. As for your bug suggestion, yes, it could be something like that, a change of interface that is not supported by chromium/chrome in its default configuration. I never did any sort of configuration of keyrings for chromium/chrome, I just click ok to open the wallet and enter my usual password to open it when asked. Some day I should invest some time figuring out how this works. :-)

archdub · 2022-09-14 00:33:56

There were very few changes between v. 5.97 and 5.98. After a quick survey of the changes in the official KDE github mirror, this is my guess for the commit that caused the issue:
https://github.com/KDE/kwallet/commit/d … cfef43688c

It is just a guess. I don't have the time or inclination to do a build without this commit to see if it would solve the problem. For now my solution was to edit /etc/pacman.conf to ignore updates of kwallet until the dust settles.

Last edited by archdub (2022-09-14 01:53:51)

seth · 2022-09-14 07:18:50

There' still

if (cfgSecrets.readEntry<bool>("apiEnabled", true)) {

so unless that's actively set to false, the commit should be idempotent?

Arch Linux

#1 2022-09-12 19:15:45

Kwallet update to v. 5.98 caused lost passwords in Chromium/Chrome

#2 2022-09-12 20:26:36

Re: Kwallet update to v. 5.98 caused lost passwords in Chromium/Chrome

#3 2022-09-12 21:18:17

Re: Kwallet update to v. 5.98 caused lost passwords in Chromium/Chrome

#4 2022-09-12 21:36:49

Re: Kwallet update to v. 5.98 caused lost passwords in Chromium/Chrome

#5 2022-09-12 22:17:15

Re: Kwallet update to v. 5.98 caused lost passwords in Chromium/Chrome

#6 2022-09-13 18:00:32

Re: Kwallet update to v. 5.98 caused lost passwords in Chromium/Chrome

#7 2022-09-13 20:20:08

Re: Kwallet update to v. 5.98 caused lost passwords in Chromium/Chrome

#8 2022-09-13 21:26:57

Re: Kwallet update to v. 5.98 caused lost passwords in Chromium/Chrome

#9 2022-09-13 21:49:14

Re: Kwallet update to v. 5.98 caused lost passwords in Chromium/Chrome

#10 2022-09-13 22:02:41

Re: Kwallet update to v. 5.98 caused lost passwords in Chromium/Chrome

#11 2022-09-14 00:33:56

Re: Kwallet update to v. 5.98 caused lost passwords in Chromium/Chrome

#12 2022-09-14 07:18:50

Re: Kwallet update to v. 5.98 caused lost passwords in Chromium/Chrome

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