In Google Chrome, when I go to a login page, a window pops up asking to "Enter password for keyring 'default' to unlock". In most cases, whether I click Cancel or enter my password, the login form gets auto filled anyway.
How do I get rid of the popup? I want it to auto login each time, not ask for my system password. The dialog box never appears for any other apps.
From the manpage:
--password-store=<basic|gnome|kwallet>
Set the password store to use. The default is to automatically detect based on the desktop environment.basicselects the built in, unencrypted password store.gnomeselects Gnome keyring.kwalletselects (KDE) KWallet. (Note that KWallet may not work reliably outside KDE.)
The easiest way to fix that in the launcher is to copy the .desktop file to your home folder and edit it (google chrome users should copy the appropriate file):
cp /usr/share/applications/chromium-browser.desktop ~/.local/share/applications
Then edit the new file such that the Exec line reads like this:
Exec=chromium-browser --password-store=basic %U
If you have any other Chromium app installed, their .desktop files should also be in ~/.local/share/applications, edit them accordingly.
First make sure libpam-gnome-keyring is installed then log out and back in.
When you open Chrome again it will ask for the password for the keyring but will give you an option to unlock the keyring every time you login. Make sure this is selected and enter your password to unlock the keyring.
You can remove this annoying message by
Ready for now!
As to popups Chromium asks for password to encrypt your passwords for websites. With no password (as it said) someone will have access to your passwords having read access to some files.
Edit: In fact, you might as well get rid of the keyring popup and the "your computer is old" flag at the same time.
sudo sed -i '/^Exec=/s/$/ --disable-infobars --password-store=basic %U/' /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop
Original answer
I made this one-liner to make disabling the password pop-up simple for when I am setting up Ubuntu VMs. I just tested it on an Ubuntu 16.04 system which had Chrome installed (not Chromium).
sudo sed -i '/^Exec=/s/$/ --password-store=basic %U/' /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop
This command adds --password-store=basic %U to the end of any line in /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop that begins with Exec=.
Credit to Capi Etheriel, who's answer I used to develop mine.
Google Chrome uses Gnome 'login' keyring to securely store passwords. It is usually protected by a password that matches your login password. Gnome keyring can automatically unlock it when the user logs in. When you login normally, the system gives the password you just entered to gnome-keyring, which then unlocks the login keyring.
So, why am I being asked to unlock a "keyring"?
When the user changes their password, the PAM module changes the password of the 'login' keyring to match.
If root changes the password, or /etc/shadow is directly edited then due to the lack of the old password, the 'login' keyring cannot be updated.
You have to update the 'login' keyring password manually.
When you have auto-login enabled or use another passwordless authentication method (for example 'fingerprint' device), you don't enter any password, and gnome-keyring cannot unlock the keyring automatically. So it asks you to unlock it.
If you have enabled disk encryption, LUKS passphrase can be reused to decrypt GNOME keyring even with auto-login. This works in Fedora out of box, but propably requires additional configuration tweaks in Ubuntu and Arch to configure initramfs to use systemd (and, therefore, systemd-cryptsetup).
Overwise, if you want to have auto-login and auto-unlock, you need to remove the keyring's password (set it to a blank one).
Links:
Setting your keyring password to your login password should resolve the issue. If you completely remove the password, your keyring will be accessible without a password (i.e. by everybode who has read access).
Ubuntu 12.10
Hope this helps
First of all, I'm by no means an Ubuntu nor a security expert. I'm just an average user / programmer that wanted to install Chrome on my Ubuntu 16.04 VM running under Parallels.
I installed Chrome, and was prompted with this annoying keyring password popup, and tried to put in my user's password to no avail.
The solution I got to work quite accidently was to:
This happened to me when I wanted to clone an entire user profile. Turns out not all apps store settings with relative pathnames.
In my case, I had to dump the dconf section for apps/seahorse/listing, replace the original directory name and reimport.
Writing here the solution as I will most likely forget when I will hit this again:
dconf dump /apps/seahorse/listing/ > dconf.txt
delete wrong pathnames in dconf.txt
(in my case, it was this line:
keyrings-selected=['secret-service://login', 'openssh:///home/OLDUSERNAME/.ssh', 'openssh:///home/NEWUSERNAME/.ssh']
)
dconf reset -f /apps/seahorse/listing/
cat dconf.txt | dconf load /apps/seahorse/listing/
I wrote a script that you can run whenever Google Chrome is updated.
Copy and paste the following script into your favorite text editor:
#!/bin/bash
sed -i 's/@\"/@ --password-store=basic"/g' /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome
Save the file with the name fixchrome in your home directory and then run the following command to make the file executable:
chmod +x ~/fixchrome
Now, you can run the following command to fix Google Chrome whenever it is updated:
sudo ~/fixchrome
1.Goto Keyring and password
2.Right Click on Login and delete.
3.Open Chrome It will ask for enter new password leave it blank and continue. thats it
If you have forgotten that major password, just delete all your local passwords on Chrome and restart again
rm ~/.local/share/keyrings/*
Chrome password for new keyring popup on chromium snap Ubuntu 25.04
I have passwordless Ubuntu login because I already have full disk encryption (of course!) and a popop appears whenever Chromium or vscode starts for the first time after boot. I store all my website passwords on Proton Pass.
I reported the issue at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bug/2073356 and Nathan Teodosio suggested the following working workaround:
snap disconnect chromium:password-manager-service
It did forced me to relogin on all sites, but then it stopped trying to create the keyring each time.
Things were also working if I just Enter through the popup leaving fields empty. It does create a new keyring each time, but I don't think it matters.
Passwordless login has always been a general annoyance in Ubuntu, it's just not generally well supported unfortunately and some issue comes up every few distros. Maybe there's a reason why it's a bad idea, not sure.
Related: Choose password for new keyring
Tested on Ubuntu 25.04, snap chromium version 136.0.7103.92.
On Xubuntu (Xfce), fixing this problem may require enabling "Launch GNOME services on startup" in Settings -> Session and Startup -> Advanced, and then logging out and in again.
