![Enter Password To Unlock Your Login Keyring Ubuntu][2]
It keeps on popping up several times before disappearing if you keep on clicking cancel. You may wonder why do you keep seeing this keyring message all the time?
Why do you use a keyring (also called [keychain][4]) in the real life? You use it to keep one or more keys grouped together so that they are easy to find and carry.
This keyring keeps your ssh keys, GPG keys and keys from applications that use this feature, like Chromium browser. By default, the **keyring is locked with a master password** which is often the login password of the account.
Every user on your system has its own keyring with (usually) the same password as that of the user account itself. When you login to your system with your password, your keyring is unlocked automatically with your account’s password.
The problem comes when you [switch to auto-login in Ubuntu][1]. This means that you login to the system without entering the password. In such case, your keyring is not unlocked automatically.
Remember I told you that the keyring was a security feature? Now imagine that on your Linux desktop, you are using auto-login. Anyone with access to your desktop can enter the system without password but you have no issues with that perhaps because you use it to browse internet only.
But if you use a browser like Chromium or [Google Chrome in Ubuntu][6], and use it to save your login-password for various websites, you have an issue on your hand. Anyone can use the browser and login to the websites for which you have saved password in your browser. That’s risky, isn’t it?
This is why when you try to use Chrome, it will ask you to unlock the keyring repeatedly. This ensures that only the person who knows the keyring’s password (i.e. the account password) can use the saved password in browser for logging in to their respective websites.
If you keep on cancelling the prompt for keyring unlock, it will eventually go away and let you use the browser. However, the saved password won’t be unlocked and you’ll see ‘sync paused’ in Chromium/Chrome browsers.
Ubuntu (and other distributions) asks for password for common admin tasks like modifying users, installing new software etc irrespective of whether you auto login or not. But for regular tasks like using a browser, it doesn’t ask for password because keyring is already unlocked.
When you switch to automatic login, you don’t enter the password for login anymore. This means that the keyring is not unlocked and hence when you try to use a browser which uses the keyring feature, it will ask to unlock the keyring.
Don’t worry. You don’t have to ‘fight the daemon’ in the terminal. Most desktop environments come with a graphical application that interacts with this daemon. On KDE, there is KDE Wallet, on GNOME and others, it’s called Password and Keys (originally known as [Seahorse][8]).
As you can see, my system has the login keyring which is automatically created. There is also a keyrings for storing GPG and SSH keys. The [Certificates][10] is for keeping the certificates (like HTTPS certificates) issued by a certificate authority.
You can also use this application to manually store passwords for website. For example, I created a new password-protected keyring called ‘Test’ and stored a password in this keyring manually.
This is slightly better than keeping a list of passwords in a text file. At least in this case your passwords can be viewed only when you unlock the keyring with password.
One potential problem here is that if you format your system, the manually saved passwords are definitely lost. Normally, you make backup of personal files, not of all the user specific data such as keyring files.
There is way to handle that. The keyring data is usually stored in ~/.local/share/keyrings directory. You can see all the keyrings here but you cannot see its content directly. If you remove the password of the keyring (I’ll show the steps in later section of this article), you can read the content of the keyring like a regular text file. You can copy this unlocked keyring file entirely and import it in the Password and Keys application on some other Linux computer (running this application).
* Most Linux has this ‘keyring feature’ installed and activated by default 大多数Linux缺省已经安装并激活了密钥环特性
* Each user on a system has its own keyring 系统上的每个用户都拥有他自己的密钥环
* The keyring is normally locked with the account’s password 密钥环通常被账户密码锁定(保护)
* Keyring is unlocked automatically when you login with your password 当您通过密码登录时密钥环会被自动解锁
* For auto-login, the keyring is not unlocked and hence you are asked to unlock it when you try to use an application that uses keyring 对于自动登录，密钥环不会自动解锁，因此当您试图使用依赖密钥环的应用程序时会被提示先解锁它
* Not all browsers or application use the keyring feature 并不是所有的浏览器或应用程序利用了密钥环特性
* There is a GUI application installed to interact with keyring (Linux上)安装了一个GUI程序可以和密钥环交互
* You can use the keyring to manually store passwords in encrypted format 您可以用密钥环来手动以加密格式来存储密码
* You can change the keyring password on your own 您可以自己修改密钥环密码
* You can export (by unlocking the keyring first) and import it on some other computer to get your manually saved passwords 您可以通过导出(需要先解锁密钥环)并导入(到其他计算机上)的方式来获取手工保存的密码。
Suppose you changed your account password. Now when you login, your system tries to unlock the keyring automatically using the new login password. But the keyring still uses the old login password.
In such a case, you can change the keyring password to the new login password so that the keyring gets unlocked automatically as soon as you login to your system.
You probably know that it is [easy to reset forgotten password in Ubuntu][14]. The problem comes with the keyring in such cases. You changed the account password but you don’t remember the old account password that is still used by the keyring.
In cases where you want to use automatic login but don’t want to unlockk keyring manually, you may choose to disable the keyring with a workaround. Keep in mind that you are disabling a security feature so think twice before doing so.
The trick is that when it asks to change the password, don’t enter a new password and hit Continue instead. This will remove any password from the keyring.
