I have run into a problem with kwallet I think. I use the Proton Authenticator app on my devices, and successfully installed the .rpm package downloaded from Proton’s site. However, when I launched the app for the first time, I was met with this error warning window.
We couldn’t create your secure storage key due to a system limitation. Please try again. If you continue without a secure storage key, your data will still be encrypted locally, but the key will be stored less securely.
Is this an issue with how Fedora has kwallet configured? I opened the GUI kwalletmanager app, and the settings page shows that the KDE wallet subsystem, and the secret service are both enabled. i asked Claude what was wrong, and it assumed that either one of those parts of kwallet were inoperable.
Hey, did you had any luck with Proton? I was having the same problem, after only being able to launch the app by appending WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1 in the terminal. I decided to try going with the “Continue Anyway” option to see what would happen.
In the app settings, there was the following warning:
Your local data is encrypted on-disk, but the encryption key is not securely stored on your system. For better protection, set up secure storage or create an app password.
Clicking “secure now” gave me the following error:
Cannot generate secure storage key. You can try to create a password app lock instead
When I set up the app password, the warning vanished, so it seems that this solved the problem. That being said, I’m still not sure if that means the encryption key is stored securely, so I was wondering if you got any feedback from Proton.
I actually submitted a support request with Proton the day of posting this thread, and they replied with:
At the moment, we only officially support GNOME for the secure storage feature and we recommend our users who are on other desktop environments to set an app password lock.
We have also opened an internal ticket regarding this matter so our team can work on developing a fix in one of our future updates.
However, we cannot specify when exactly that might be.
We appreciate your understanding regarding this as well as for taking the time to report this to us.
From the sound of it Proton isn’t supporting KDE’s tools yet, if they ever will. This seems to be the same issue with their VPN app. It works on GNOME, but not KDE I believe. So for now we can use Proton Authenticator, but it isn’t securely storing the keys with KDE Wallet. You’re relying on disk encryption to secure the data. The app password is just a check before actually opening the app. I do not believe this is actually encrypting the data.
This is a good reminder for me to respond to the email from Proton to ask them to support KDE in the future. I use their services a fair deal, and would like to continue to. However, this setup doesn’t leave me feeling super great being the machine is a mobile device.
If you prefer not to use a mobile device, you can try alternative authenticators like KeePassXC. In addition to managing passwords, it can also function as a 2FA authenticator.
It’s very unfortunate that they aren’t supporting KDE Wallet as of now. I also sent them an email but got no answer yet. When I do, I’ll be sure to also ask them to support KDE.
Indeed their solution is far from ideal on a mobile device. I think I might get away with it since I only use fedora on my home PC, but I’d still like them to fully support KDE in the future.
Again, thanks for the answer and best of luck with your Authenticator App!