Keepass crashes while decrypting private keys (most of the time)

[attisan]

hi, since the last two updates (currently on 0.13.3.0) keepass will crash most of the time while keeagent is Decryping SSH Private Key (actually Decrypting #374) without further notice - it is just gone. How can I assist on debugging this problem? (I have about 20 entries).

[dlech]

You can build and run a debug version of KeePass + KeeAgent in Visual Studio, then we can see exactly where the crash is.

[dlech]

Or if you can create a new SSH key that triggers the crash and share it here I can have a look.

[shadow00]

Can confirm, I have the same issue (since v0.13, iirc). It happens more frequently (in fact, almost certainly) when my cpu is already under high load (80-90%), to the point that I have to restart keepass several times before it succeeds. I don't think it's related to a specific key, because sometimes it crashes almost immediately, while other times it crashes towards the end (I have 13 ed25519 keys and 4 rsa-4096 keys, most of them with a short comment). It's almost as if it crashes when the operation is taking too long. However, I have no idea if the keys are always loaded in the same order or not, so I don't know for sure that it's not a specific key.

I'm about to try v0.13.4, will report back if I notice any difference.

[dlech]

I don't expect the new version to make a difference. Unless someone can share a database to reproduce the problem, we can't really make any progress here.

[BWibo]

I can confirm this. The issue could be the same as in #366.

[BWibo]

I managed to reproduce the crash with the test database attached. It resembles the SSH key situation in my original database:

• 1x RAS 4096
• 3x ED25519 256
• Database key transformations: 20144768

Version info:

• I'm using latest Win10 and WSL2 (Ubuntu 22), which is linked with KeeAgent according to this guide:
  https://gist.github.com/strarsis/e533f4bca5ae158481bbe53185848d49
• Keepass 2.53 x64 portable
• KeeAgent 0.13.3.0

Here is the test database: crash.zip
Password:

changeMe

[BWibo]

Any progress on this or anything else I can contribute to resolve this?

I'm using Windows Subsystem Linux 2 and the approach described here to use my SSH keys in WSL2. I am also runing Docker within the WSL2. Maybe this causes problems?

@attisan @shadow00: Are you using a similar setup?

A workaround that currently works for me is using KeepassCX with the native Windows 10 OpenSSH Agent.
I needed to upgrade Windows 10 OpenSSH Agent (v 8.1, see here) to get this running.

[attisan]

@BWibo my use case for this module regards accessing linux servers through winscp and vscode (remote extension).

After reading what @shadow00 wrote, I'm now have something of a workaround - as I start my computer and leave it to boot and to "settle in" while I fetch my coffee before logging into windows 🙄. this way I have a rather good success rate. so it seems really tide to the CPU usage.

[shadow00]

@BWibo I'm running an older version of Win10 and I use this in combination with Git Bash. No WSL.

But I'm pretty sure that the setup itself doesn't matter - I think it's an issue with the loading of the keys themselves.

Thanks for the suggestion to upgrade the windows openssh agent - sometimes I can't stop whatever I'm doing just to reduce the cpu load and get keeagent to start without crashing, so it would be nice to have KPXC as a backup for ssh too.

[dlech]

I am not able to reproduce the issue. I tried using the database from #382 (comment) and I used CpuStres to try to reproduce the suspected high CPU condition. All keys loaded without crashing. Using KeePass 2.53.1 and KeeAgent 0.13.4 on Windows 11 22H2.

[dlech]

I think I spoke too soon. After some more tries, I am able to get a crash.

[dlech]

Closing as duplicate of #366 since I am getting the same stack trace as reported there.