237121 - Master Password cannot contain characters larger than ASCII 127

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 252436

(MailNews Core :: Security, defect)

Description

[Andreas Uebing]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040310
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7b) Gecko/20040310

Master passwords that contain characters larger than ASCII 127 (e.g. §, ß,
german umlauts ä,ö,ü, ...) can be set in the security preferences, but are not
accepted, when prompted for while signing mails, importing certificates, etc.
However, they are accepted, when changing the master password.

The largest character possible seems to be '~' (ASCII 126), '€' (ASCII 128) fails.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. set master password to something that contains character > ASCII 127 
2. send a signed mail or import a certificate

Actual Results:  
the master password is not accepted, the dialog pops up again and again

Comment 1

[Andreas Uebing]

The problem occurs both in Mozilla Mail and in Mozilla Thunderbird, Windows and
Linux

Comment 2

[Andreas Uebing]

Ooops, ASCII doesn't contain characters beyond 127, of course. I meant ISO8859-1.

Comment 3

[Christian Schilling]

I am able to confirm this problem for the Mac OS X platform.

It seems to me the "change master password" dialog and the password prompt use
different character codings. For example, if you enter "§" (paragraph symbol) as
master password, you won't be able to pass the password prompt unless you enter
"§" which corresponds to the utf-8 twobyte representation of the paragraph symbol.

Comment 4

[James Ross]

Maybe similar/same as bug 198185?

Man this one annoyed me today. I am so glad that the characters still work in
the "Change Password" window!

Confirming bug from comments and my own experience of the bug. :)

Comment 5

[Kai Engert [:KaiE:]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 252436 ***