462469 - Password manager repeatedly asking for login credentials

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 348997

(Firefox :: Security, defect)

Description

[Ambrose Li]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092414 Firefox/3.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092414 Firefox/3.0.3

When tabs are restored and one or more pages asks for a password, the password manager asks for your password. In some cases, it will ask for the same password over and over.

Observation 1: The number of dialogs that appears seems to increase with time. If you enter the password immediately when it pops up, there will be no more popups; if you enter the password a couple of minutes after the first one pops up, maybe you'll need to enter your password 2 or 3 times; if you wait a few more minutes, you might need to enter your password 4 or 5 times, maybe more.

(Actually, it is incorrect to say that "the dialog appears over and over" (meaning after you enter your password it pops up again). What happens is that the same dialog appears multiple times at the same location. You can verify that this is the case by moving the password dialog; you will find that there's another one beneath it.)

The above symptoms seem to be identical with bug 397398, so perhaps it's the same bug (if the password managers in both Thunderbird and Firefox share the same code base).

Observation 2: What you enter in subsequent dialogs seem to override what you enter earlier. I.e., if you enter your password correctly, then found that you still have to enter it 10 more times so you press Cancel for all the rest, you have NOT entered your master password.

Most of the time, when this happens, it is difficult to focus on the password field. Sometimes you can get out by pressing the dialog's Cancel button. Sometimes you'll have to kill Firefox to get out of this.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a few tabs, one or more of which requires you to enter a password
2. Quit Firefox
3. Restart Firefox so that it tries to restore all tabs
4. Wait a few minutes before entering your master password
Actual Results:  
More than one master password dialog can appear

Even if you enter the password correctly, pressing Cancel for the superfluous dialogs cause Firefox to forget that you have entered it

Expected Results:  
Only one master password dialog should be on the screen at any one time

If you have entered your master password correctly, then it is entered correctly; even if there are many more dialogs, if you pressed Cancel Firefox should still know that you have entered it once and not subsequently entered a wrong password

Comment 1

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

dupe of 348997

Comment 2

[Ambrose Li]

No, this is NOT a dupe of 348997. 

348997 describes a situation where you "have to fill in the username and password for each tab otherwise it will fail to load" (in description). In this bug, it isn't even possible for you to fill in username and password in any tab, because the master password dialog (or rather dialogs) will be blocking your way.

Comment 3

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

bug 348997 has to be the same thing as the dialog is modal meaning the browser can't be touched till you dismiss it either by clicking cancel (then nothing shows) or typing the password. so when it says "have to fill in the username and
password for each tab otherwise it will fail to load", it means consecutively.

Comment 4

[Ambrose Li]

Ok. Why was that bug so hard to find? I thought I went through ALL master password related bugs

Comment 6

[Nochum Sossonko [:Natch]]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Ok. Why was that bug so hard to find? I thought I went through ALL master
> password related bugs

No worries, with some 500,000 bugs in this system, it's bound to be hard ;) (I happened to know of the bug already).