[gentoo-user] Cryfs error Crashed Deserialization failed - missing nullbyte for string termination

[Alexander Puchmayr <alexander.puchmayr@linznet.at>]

Hi there,

I just encountered a weird problem when trying to access my kde-plasma vault. 
Although I entered the correct password, it refused to open. Journalctl shows

Nov 01 18:41:50 zeus kded5[1348]: OUT:  "CryFS Version 0.10.3\n\nPassword: 
\nDeriving encryption key (this can take some time)...done\n"
Nov 01 18:41:50 zeus kded5[1348]: ERR:  "[2022-11-01 18:41:50.894] [Log] 
[error] Crashed: Deserialization failed - missing nullbyte for string 
termination\n"

Using cryfs on the command line shows the same thing:

alex@zeus ~ $ cryfs .local/share/plasma-vault/Privat.enc Vaults/Privat/
CryFS Version 0.10.3

Password: 
Deriving encryption key (this can take some time)...done
[2022-11-01 18:49:24.052] [Log] [error] Crashed: Deserialization failed - 
missing nullbyte for string termination

Googling this error shows exactly 3 (!) matches, the most useful is assuming a 
corruption on the file system; so I compared with backup, even more than 
several months ago. No changes, the files are identical and the backup is OK.

Next, I copied the encrypted files from .local/share/plasma-vault to an ubuntu 
installation (kubuntu-2020-04LTS which uses cryfs 0.10.2 instead of 0.10.3 
that gentoo uses) , and there the container opened fine. 

It looks like as if gentoo's cryfs 0.10.3-r1 cannot open the container, 
ubuntu's 0.10.2 can. What's wrong with the gentoo version? Any ideas? 

Thanks in advance