Signal App (Flatpak) Broken by Latest MariaDB updates?

Ask Fedora
1

Hey All,

Some time ago I installed the Signal Messenger app via flatpak (flathub remote), and, until recently, all was pretty good.

However, a few days ago, I started getting failures accompanied by weird database related error messages. I went ahead and let Signal clobber whatever database I had for my account and start a new one. Welp, the second time I fired it up? Failure.

I took a quick peek at my system journal and saw this snippet:

Sep 27 09:10:10 xxhostnamexx org.signal.Signal.desktop[15168]: 2024-09-27 09:10:10.790: ERROR CORE sqlcipher_page_cipher: hmac check failed for pgno=1
Sep 27 09:10:10 xxhostnamexx org.signal.Signal.desktop[15168]: 2024-09-27 09:10:10.790: ERROR CORE sqlite3Codec: error decrypting page 1 data: 1
Sep 27 09:10:10 xxhostnamexx org.signal.Signal.desktop[15168]: 2024-09-27 09:10:10.790: ERROR CORE sqlcipher_codec_ctx_set_error 1
Sep 27 09:10:10 xxhostnamexx org.signal.Signal.desktop[15168]: 2024-09-27 09:10:10.869: ERROR CORE sqlcipher_page_cipher: hmac check failed for pgno=1
Sep 27 09:10:10 xxhostnamexx org.signal.Signal.desktop[15168]: 2024-09-27 09:10:10.869: ERROR CORE sqlite3Codec: error decrypting page 1 data: 1
Sep 27 09:10:10 xxhostnamexx org.signal.Signal.desktop[15168]: 2024-09-27 09:10:10.869: ERROR CORE sqlcipher_codec_ctx_set_error 1

Then I looked at my recent package upgrade history and found that several MariaDB packages had upgraded similar to mariadb-3:10.11.9-1 from mariadb-3:10.11.8-3. Hmm, curious.

So I thought I’d drop in here to ask if anyone else is experiencing this issue. I know that I can try rolling back those mariadb-related packages, but I thought I’d try to put together some sort of report to the Signal folks and want to investigate this issue deeply enough into this to make it make sense for them.

Thanks for any ideas you crew may have on this.

2

Are you sure it’s MariaDB? The snippet mentions sqlite3 and afaik that’s separate from MySQL/other DBs.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the quick response!

And, no, I have to idea what that it’s connected with that. I probably should’ve thought this out a bit more before I created the thread title… :frowning:

4

That makes a whole lot more sense. sqlite is often used for application meta/data and makes sense in a flatpak context, where depending on a local rpm installed mariadb does not.

5

Is it this by any chance (always good to check the GitHub repo for the Flatpak):

1 Like
6

Ha! Yes, this is the exact error sequence I began to see. It evolves as you delete the database and start over, and even more when you start from scratch by doing an uninstall/install of the app.

Thanks so much for pointing this out!

I only use this one flatpak application on my system, so I don’t really know much about them, including how and where to check for common errors on such applications. Now I do thanks to you. :slight_smile:

Cheers!

1 Like