Google says it has fixed a major Chrome OS bug that locked users out of their devices. Google's bulletin says that Chrome OS version 91.0.4472.165, which was briefly available this week, renders users unable to log in to their devices, essentially bricking them.
Chrome OS automatically downloads updates and switches to the new version after a reboot, so users who reboot their devices are suddenly locked out them. The go-to advice while this broken update is out there is to not reboot.
The bulletin says that a new build, version 91.0.4472.167, is rolling out now to fix the issue, but it could take a "few days" to hit everyone. Users affected by the bad update can either wait for the device to update again or "powerwash" their device—meaning wipe all the local data—to get logged in. Chrome OS is primarily cloud-based, so if you're not doing something advanced like running Linux apps, this solution presents less of an inconvenience than it would on other operating systems. Still, some users are complaining about lost data.
ChromeOS is open source, so we can get a bit more detail about the fix thanks to Android Police hunting down a Reddit comment from user elitist_ferret. The problem apparently boils down to a single-character typo. Google flubbed a conditional statement in Chrome OS's Cryptohome VaultKeyset, the part of the OS that holds user encryption keys. The line should read "if (key_data_.has_value() && !key_data_->label().empty()) {" but instead of "&&"—the C++ version of the "AND" operator—the bad update used a single ampersand, breaking the second half of the conditional statement.
It sounds like, because of this error, Chrome OS never properly checked user passwords against the stored keys, so even correct passwords came back with a message saying, "Sorry, your password could not be verified."
The whole selling point of Chrome OS is that it's reliable and unbreakable, and botched updates like this hurt the OS. It's not clear how such an obvious, show-stopping problem like this made it into the stable release channel. Chrome OS has three testing channels that changes are supposed to go through—the "canary," "dev," and "beta" channels—with weeks of testing between releases. Somehow this bug escaped that entire process. This problem also seems like something a unit test or automated testing could have caught—not being able to log in is pretty obvious.
The error marks the second defective Chrome OS update pushed out this month. An update at the beginning of July made CPU usage spike on some models, slowing them down to a crawl.
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