I have a weird problem - one quite contrary to most of the threads regarding networkmanager and Gnome keyring which are all “Gnome keyring asks me to unlock everytime I login… its annoying”
I want this behaviour, but can’t figure out how to get it! All the wireless connections I make are in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections and unencrypted. I don’t mind this for my personal wifi networks, there isn’t much at stake there, however I have a few WPA Enterprise connections for which it really does matter because my username and password for those places (which is the same for emails, online portal, etc.) are saved in plain text.
How can I tell NetworkManager to make use of the gnome keyring?
I have tried un-ticking the “Available to all users” box, but that doesn’t work. Gnome keyring does seem to be working, because it is used for my Gnome “Online Accounts”.
This appears to be a problem in the NetworkManager design, rather than the opensuse setup. Maybe try contacting the developers.
In KDE, it does ask for the kdewallet password. But it only stores inconsequention information there. The WPA key is still stored centrally in an unencrypted text file (the same file as you are seeing with gnome).
Based on some personal investigation with knetworkmanager and kde, by default WPA credentials are stored in KDE wallet, although in “Properties” you can specify storing in a text file (note this is <not> ordinarily recommended AFAIK).
But, because knetworkmanager (and Gnome Network Manager in general) implements spa_supplicant for most WPA functionality including making connections, the <hashed> (not unencrypted) password string is written and configured in wpa_supplicant.conf. Note that at least for knetworkmanager, although the hashed password is written to wpa_supplicant.conf, it’s not ordinarily relevant (unless wpa_supplicant is invoked directly, not through knetworkmanager). When using knetworkmanager, the credentials stored in KDE Wallet are used, not the hashed values in wpa_supplicant.conf.
I can’t comment on the OP’s issue, I don’t know if Network Manager running on the Gnome desktop can specify keyrings (you can’t in knetworkmanager which suggests to me it’s probably not an available feature).
That was true with opensuse 11.4. For that matter, gnome keyring was used with 11.4. Although he did not say, I assume that the OP is using 12.1, where NetworkManager has changed in how it handles keys.
So am I right in thinking that by design NetworkManager always stores plaintext passwords?
NetworkManager doesn’t even call the gnome keyring, so obviously when I delete the password in the system-connections file, the connection is not longer available.
I think if NetworkManager is unable to do anything but save passwords in plaintext, this is a bug.