Hi There,
We are running Fedora 33 on cinammon on desktop gaming rig
We are getting a strange error from one of the user accounts (different user login) on one of our desktops.
It says: "An upplication wants to access the keyring “Default keyring” but it’s locked.
Can someone tell us what is a “keyring” and how do we clear this?
The problem happens only for one user account (which doesn’t have a login password, maybe thats why?)
It only seems to pop up when using a browser (brave)
With the application “Passwords & Keys” you can create/manage so called “Key-rings” (imagine a key-ring literally). If you are the owner of it you will have access to whatever you have a Private & Public key.
Public-keys are needed to access to local and remote accounts. They will always be used as a pair. Public-keys can be stored on remote systems an the Private once should just be stored on a local machine where they “should be save”. By creating such a pair you can secure it with a passphrase, and that’s what you are asked for.
It is named default key-ring because you not gave him a name. What means again, as a user, you can have more than one key-ring.
Yes, if you create a new key pair without passphrase (for this user) probably it should not ask anymore for that. What in the other hand means it is less secure.
Ah right thanks for explaining, so if I create a password for that user when they login to thier user account (even though they dont have admin rights over the system) they won’t get this prompt anymore?
Do they have to have sudo access?
I talked about a passphrase what not is the same as an user-accounts password.
Have you ever used ssh-keygen ? Then you probably understand better from what I’m talking.
An application is connecting over the SSH protocol …
Okay not sure what that means but I tried to create a user password and that didnt make a difference. Still the same error message apears
No i have not used ssh-keygen before.
okay ill give that a try
Okay I went to follow your advise but to be honest I’m a bit worried to do this, does it open the application up to external threats or is it only local threats (people who jump on the system face to face).
I really don’t quite understand the point of these “keys” and passwords for individual apps.
GNOME Keyring stores app passwords encrypted with your login password by default.
It can help protect against an attacker that has access to your data, but does not know your password.
This can be relevant for lost mobile devices, or desktop devices with multi-user access.