1password extension for Firefox is extremely slow to unlock / save

Maikel

My 1password extension for Firefox is extremely slow to show login on unlock.
I have applied all settings from this post https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/comment/178943/#Comment_178943 , but not resolved.

It's taking about 13 seconds to show logins and about 5 second to save each new login.

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1Password Version: 4.6.0.592
Extension Version: 4.4.3
OS Version: Windows 10 6.2.9200
Sync Type: Dropbox

AGAlumB

@Maikel: You'll see the greatest benefit from the "Tune 1Password..." settings when searching for a login, since it disables multiple URLs and 1Password only has to search the decrypted overview, as opposed to decrypting every single item.

I'm not seeing this long of a delay myself when unlocking 1Password in Firefox (I'm seeing a 5 second delay at most, on a fresh launch), so perhaps there is some key difference between our 1Password setups:

• Which vault format are you using?
• How many items do you have in the vault?
• How many logins do you have in the vault?

It may also simply be a more general performance issue. For example, I have a fairly light Windows 10 install running off of an SSD. Ultimately 1Password isn't merely reading your data from disk; it's decrypting it in real time, and this does, of course, take time.

Can you tell me what version of Firefox you're using? Since you're singling out Firefox, are you seeing different results in other browsers?

I'm seeing roughly the same unlock time every browser, though of course it differs from your experience. Ultimately they should be the same since this is handled by the Helper regardless of browser, so if there's a big discrepancy with one it may indicate an issue with the browser or extension installation.

Please let me know what you find. I look forward to hearing back from you! :)

Maikel

Hi @brenty !

Recently, I changed to Open Vault format when Dave sent the e-mail talking about the security holes that Microsoft had "discovered" in 1Password

In my vault, I have 615 logins and 723 itens.
My Firefox version is 42.0.

I use SSD on my laptop and in Chrome (46.0.2490.86 m) dosen't happen this slowness, is almost instant unlock and save the new logins (about 3 seconds and 1 second, respectively)

Thanks!

MikeT

Hi @Maikel,

If you unlock first in Chrome and then switch to Firefox, does 1Password seem fast in Firefox?

There are no security holes found in 1Password by Microsoft and Microsoft hasn't reported anything with us. There was a blog post by a guy who works for Microsoft but that post was not made by Microsoft, it was a personal blog post. He wrote about the metadata he found in the agilekeychain format, which is not a security risk or hole but rather a privacy issue. Your data is definitely not at risk and this was by design, something we explained about our agilekeychain format many years ago.

Basically, the older .agilekeychain format was built many years ago and we did not encrypt the title and URL fields while keeping the rest of them encrypted. This allows for big performance improvements, something that many years ago, computers and mobile devices didn't have a lot of. We've been building something for the next decade, which is the OPVault format, which does keep everything encrypted but it still has some metadata left not encrypted such as when the item was created, what type of item it is but nothing else about your item, your title and URL will be encrypted.

Maikel

Hi @MikeT !

Sorry for the delay to answer.
I was wrong, in Chrome is going the same problem.
I think in time I tried to unlock, I have not restarted the 1Password application.

I restored the agilekeychain vault to test, when I unlock it does not delay.
The slowness occurs only in Open Vault, encryption is something related?

AGAlumB

@Maikel: Indeed, that makes sense. While it will vary from system to system, OPVault will often be slower.

Even on a high end system with a tiny vault where both OPVault and AgileKeychain unlock 'instantaneously' as far as we can perceive, OPVault is encrypting more than AgileKeychain, and a newer vault of either type will also use a higher number of PBKDF2 iterations to strengthen your Master Password — and therefore your data — against brute force attacks.

We'll continue to work to improve performance, but (un)fortunately there isn't a shortcut when it comes to strong encryption.

MikeT

Hi @Maikel,

In addition to what brenty said, this is why we originally didn't encrypt the URLs a long time ago, we had to decrypt every single item to grab its URL. We made changes to optimize this in OPVault but it is not yet enough at the moment on Windows.

One thing you can do to improve the performance is open the main 1Password program, go to the Help Menu > Advanced > Tune 1Password for max performance. 1Password will turn off features that are known to slow down the process (not security related) and adjust it, so that it make it a bit quicker.

I have 800+ logins and on a fast SSD, it takes about 4-5 seconds but I do have 1Password configured to turn off certain features.

However, we are working on speeding this up over time.