1439317 - Firefox Nightly appears to corrupt Sync saved logins storage

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1295122

(Firefox :: Sync, defect)

Description

[Mario Baldini]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0
Build ID: 20180218220057

Steps to reproduce:

- Using Firefox Nightly 
- sometimes opening Firefox stable (both sharing the same profile folder). 
- Without apparent reason (or config/plugin change), Firefox Sync gets disconnected. 


Firefox Nightly: 60.0a1 (2018-02-18)
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Linux Mint 18.3 Sylvia"
Linux latitude 4.14.14-041414-generic #201801201219 SMP Sat Jan 20 12:20:41 UTC 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Sync settings as true: Bookmarks, History, Logins, Addresses.  NOT checked: Open tabs, Credit cards, Add-ons, Preferences






Actual results:

- After reconnecting to Sync (re-entering credentials), none saved logins are displayed in the list. Bookmarks, history, etc are fine, only the saved logins are missing.
- Sync works fine, but without any previously stored credential.

- They are missing only in that given machine/profile. If logging into a new machine, Sync displays every previous password correctly. 


It is the third time it happened in the past 12 months. I tried to fix the profile folder, based on multiple similar support or bug tickets, but none of them worked (that's why I'm filling this bug). The only fix was deleting entirely the profile folder. Doing so it fully recovers every Sync info (same Firefox, OS, etc version).

No passwords were lost, but apparently the saved credentials DB gets corrupted over time, don't displaying previously saved items.


Expected results:

- Firefox Sync session was never disconnected. 
- Even if it was, after re-connecting, every information should be in sync (saved passwords, bookmarks, etc).

Comment 2

[Dana Keeler (she/her) (use needinfo) [:keeler]]

Bug 1427248 is Windows-specific, so I don't think this is a duplicate of that one.

Comment 3

[Kanchan Kumari QA]

Ryan, can you please help here? Thanks!

Comment 4

[Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly]]

Thanks for the ping!  Redirecting to some folks on the sync team who may be able to comment further.

> - Without apparent reason (or config/plugin change), Firefox Sync gets disconnected. 

Sync stores its access credentials in the passwords db alongside all your saved passwords.  So what might be happening here is that the password store gets corrupted, which causes sync to disconnect, which fails to sync passwords after reconnecting due to the corruption.

Kit, does this sound like any of our existing bugs on similar topic?

Comment 5

[Lina Butler [:lina]]

I think this is bug 1295122, which we've seen fairly consistently, but haven't been able to reproduce or explain. :-(

(In reply to Ryan Kelly [:rfkelly] from comment #4)
> Sync stores its access credentials in the passwords db alongside all your
> saved passwords.  So what might be happening here is that the password store
> gets corrupted, which causes sync to disconnect, which fails to sync
> passwords after reconnecting due to the corruption.

Yes.

Comment 6

[Mario Baldini]

I have a copy of the old profile folder (and the new one, rebuild from scratch and functional). 

Is it of any help? Maybe it has some useful logs?

Also, I enabled `signon.debug` and `javascript.options.showInConsole` settings, as recommended in Bug 1295122. 

Cheers

Comment 7

[Mark Hammond (PTO; back Oct-3) [:markh] [:mhammond]]

(In reply to Mario Baldini from comment #6)
> I have a copy of the old profile folder (and the new one, rebuild from
> scratch and functional). 
> 
> Is it of any help? Maybe it has some useful logs?

If upgrading from that old profile copy always reproduces the issue, and the profile doesn't have personal information that you are uncomfortable sharing with me (or some other mozilla staff member), then grabbing a copy of that profile would likely be very interesting.

Sadly there will not be any useful logs in it though.

> Also, I enabled `signon.debug` and `javascript.options.showInConsole`
> settings, as recommended in Bug 1295122. 

Copies of the logs generated by that process as the problem occurs would also be very interesting.

Comment 8

[Mario Baldini]

Dear Mark, 

I assume that the passwords DB is stored encrypted on disk, right? So there would not be any (significant) security compromise? 

Also, could you point out any subfolder that does not have significant relevance? Probably the website history, cache, ..?

I could send the compressed version of the buggy profile and the working one (recreated in the same machine). 

Best regards,

Mario

Comment 9

[Mark Hammond (PTO; back Oct-3) [:markh] [:mhammond]]

The logs are encrypted on disk, but unless you use a master-password, everything needed to decrypt them is also on disk right next to it :) I understand that leaves you in a very tricky position - I'd be very reluctant to share info that could be used to determine my passwords too. For this particular bug, there's not really other information stored in the profile that would help - however:

(In reply to Mario Baldini from comment #6)
> Also, I enabled `signon.debug` and `javascript.options.showInConsole`
> settings, as recommended in Bug 1295122. 

That process should have generated some diagnostic data that will not disclose any of your passwords and could be very valuable.