Copying one time password consistently fails
I have a VPN that requires me to use a one time password for connecting.
When the password request dialog pops up I click the 1 password icon in the OSX menu bar, click on the login in the list (it's in my favourites) then click on the one time password item to copy it to my clipboard so I can paste it into the dialog.
Very consistently the first time I do this it fails to copy and I notice that what I paste is not 6 characters long. I think it is just whatever was in my clipboard previously.
So I click the menu icon again, click the one time password again and then paste into the dialog and this time it works.
This happens I think every time I try to connect to this VPN (the app is Tunnelblick if that makes a difference).
1Password Version: 7.3.2
Extension Version: 4.7.5.90
OS Version: OSX 10.15.1
Sync Type: Not Provided
Comments
-
@Mossop - I'm not sure why that would be the case; the ability to copy passwords from within 1Password isn't a function of what specific site you have saved in a particular Login item. You've never experienced this with any other item for which you try to copy the password in the mini?
One thing you can try to see if it affects anything (and it's actually faster for most people than mousing around the screen) would be to use the Shift‑Control‑Command‑C (
⇧⌘^C) keyboard shortcut to copy the one-time password of the item in the mini, then try pasting that. If the problem persists when you do that, let us know.0 -
I'm not sure if it affects any other sites, I can't actually think of any other cases where I routinely copy from the mini and paste, the vast majority of my logins are just autofilled through the browser which works fine. I'll give the keyboard shortcut a try.
0 -
As far as I can tell using the keyboard shortcut is working everytime, it's just extremely awkward.
0 -
:) :+1:
0 -
Found this thread because I've been hitting nearly the exact same problem. MacOS 10.14.5 w/ 1P 7.4.1. It's been bugging me for at least a couple of months now, on two different Macs.
Like the OP, I too need to log into a desktop VPN client (Checkpoint). It's easier to click on the menubar icon (just realized I can use the cmd-\ shortcut to make mini open up, durh) and then use the keyboard to navigate to what I need rather than going through the whole thing with the mouse. First is the password - arrow down to the favorite, arrow over into the favorite, arrow down to the password and hit enter to copy. That pretty much always works.
When I go through the same steps to copy the OTP, maybe 60-70% of the time on the first try, copying the OTP doesn't work. The password is still on the clipboard, so that's what gets pasted into the OTP prompt of the VPN client when I hit cmd-v. Also like the OP mentioned, I know it's wrong because the password is much longer than the OTP. The second try - same method - almost always works. That is, on the second attempt, the OTP is copied. No idea why it doesn't work the first time.
Most of the time if I use the mouse to get to the OTP and click it with the mouse to copy, it seems to work the first time? Because the behavior is unpredictable it's hard to remember exactly what works (and doesn't) when. Again like the OP, this is probably the only time I use this method. Nearly everything else is autofilled with cmd-\
0 -
I can consistently reproduce this issue using the Desktop app on MacOS. I invoke the mini app using the shortcut, unlock it, type the password I want, click Copy on a OTP and it doesn't copy, then I do that again and it copies it. It's like some click-jacking protection kicks in or a bug?
0 -
Sorry to hear that, @cabello. Just to ask, does the keyboard shortcut that Lars mentioned yield any better results for you? And are you seeing issues with copying anything from anywhere else, or is it just one-time passwords from 1Password? Much like Ana, I haven't been able to reproduce this myself.
0 -
A little bit of followup that I hope helps track this down.
In my previous comment, I noted that I almost always used the mouse to open 1P mini. Since then, I've more often used cmd-\ to get it open while the VPN client is in focus, and then same as before navigated to the password/otp with the arrow keys. This has made no difference. More often than not, the OTP is not copied until the second attempt. As noted above, instead the password is left on the clipboard.
- I believe the OTP always copies on the second attempt - it has never required a third try that I can recall.
- The auto-copied OTP always works properly. That is, for example, 1P autofills the username/password into a website using cmd-\, and then automatically copies the OTP making it ready for the next screen. This copy operation always works correctly.
- There are no other copy/paste issues more generally with the OS or other applications, or even 1P, that I'm aware of.
0 -
Quick followup - this issue persists, albeit with the same 60-70% of the time behavior as before, in Catalina with 1P 7.5.
0 -
At this point nobody on the team has been able to reproduce this issue, which unfortunately makes it difficult (if not impossible) to track down and resolve. Coping the TOTP value to the clipboard is working reliably on all of our computers. Is there another computer that you have access to that you could test this on, and see if you see the same behavior? I wonder if perhaps there is some conflict with other software you have installed.
Ben
0 -
@Ben I wish I had more information to give you. A problem that can't be reproduced is difficult to run down, for sure. The other computer is set up more or less the same, and behaves the same way.
I spent some time last night (after disabling SIP) trying to track the activity of pboard with dtrace/dtruss but basically got nowhere. While I can usually sort out what strace in Linux is telling me, I don't know dtrace/dtruss well, so that could be part of the problem. dtruss seems to go way further down into the stack, and dtrace maybe wants to somehow be configured with "probes" first? I tried using Hopper to attach to the pboard process, but the Hopper UI is being dumb, and gets itself stuck in a must-force-quit loop.
Finder has 'Edit > Show Clipboard' - but there are a few problems I ran into. This window only shows the contents, rather than the activity (ie write to clipboard, read from clipboard). Second, the window only seems to refresh when you click on it. Lastly, and infuriatingly, the window disappears when Finder loses focus. It reappears when Finder is in focus again.
I'm starting to wonder if the problem is a weird interaction between a menubar application, pboard, and 1P. Like the OP, I'm having trouble with a VPN client. But we're having the same issue with different VPN clients. From what the OP said, it sounds like their client is also a menubar app.
If you have any thoughts or suggestions on how I might be able to track activity/reads/writes to pboard, I'm happy to give them a shot.
I don't know if the OTP copy is being somehow blocked/interrupted, if for some dumb reason the VPN client is copying the password back to the clipboard and overwriting the OTP, etc. My thought was that if I can track/log pboard operations, I might be able to give you more to work with.
0 -
I am afraid I don't have any good suggestions here :( I also have a VPN running in the menu bar, but I just cannot reproduce this, so perhaps it's not directly related? Although we might be using different VPN's, which could be behaving differently, I suppose that's an option too.
0 -
I've noticed some behavior changes in 1P 7.6 especially as to how it 1P mini detects what site or app you're using. It might be related, I don't think I've run into the weird didn't-copy-TOTP problem since going to 7.6. It's possible that whatever the underlying quirk that caused the problem was fixed!
0
