Keefox (KeePassRPC) silently breaks if ProtectedData.Protect fails.

[TobiX]

Hi,

I wondered why I had to reauthorize the KeeFox connection on every Keepass2 restart and traced this back to KeePassRPC not saving the key to the config file (and not showing the key in the "Authorized clients" list), but it works for the current session. Setting the security level to "Low" also fixes this problem.

So I traced this back to KeePassRPCClient.cs around line 252, where the CryptographicException possibly thrown from ProtectedData.Protect is swallowed and never shown to the user. I wrote a small test program (well, copied the sample from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.security.cryptography.protecteddata%28v=vs.110%29.aspx) and sure enough:

Data was not encrypted. An error occurred.
System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException: Data protection failed. ---> System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException: Improperly protected user's key pairs in '/home/tobias/.config/.mono/keypairs'.

Well. Thanks mono. Removing the '/home/tobias/.config/.mono/keypairs' directory (which is currently empty) fixed everything (Mono recreated the directory with the correct permissions and added a keypair there).

Please, at least add debug logging there (and maybe add this problem to your Troubleshooting guide?)

[luckyrat]

Thanks for reporting the problem.

I've added some logging there for KeeFox 1.4.

Any idea why Mono got itself in this state? If this is a common issue then I'll gladly add it to the troubleshooting guide but I don't want to list every obscure problem that's ever happened in there or it will become too difficult to spot the things that are most likely to affect other users.

[TobiX]

Only happened on one Debian unstable (of 3), so not that common probably...

[slcpunk]

This also fixed it for me. ( Ubuntu 14.04 ). Man it was driving me crazy. Going to reference this post from the few other places the issue was raised.

[dkebler]

Just reporting the same behavior ubuntu 14.10/mint 17.1.
I am running mono 3.12.0-0xamarin4
Like the others it "just started to happen :-)" a few days ago.
I followed @TobiX 's advice to remove the keypair but that did not resolve the issue.
I followed advice to set security to low but when I restart keepass the rpc has reset it back to medium and still the issue continues.
I did a minor update of mono from 3.12 marin3 to 3.12 marin4 but that did not resolve the issue.

The issue remains. Unfortunately I run three profiles of firefox so it's not particularly fun to reset the authorization three times each time I start keypass (which fortunately is only at boot)

If I can provide any logging which will help just let me know how.

FYI Running RPC plugin 1.4.4 and keefox 1.4.6.