Device access permission isn’t working

Volker Buchwald · 2026-08-05T15:23:33+00:00

Hallo, ich gehe gerade die ersten Schritte mit der HTProtect.app. Nachdem gestern nach der Registrierung und Einrichtung der ersten Webseiten alles rund lief, komme ich heute nicht mehr weiter, denn ich bekomme das Fenster mit der Freigabe für den Gerätezugriff einfach nicht mehr weg (siehe beigefügter Screensho). Wenn ich den Button "Freigeben" anklicke passiert nichts weiter und ich weiß nicht, wo ich vielleicht auf dem Schlauch stehe. Ich habe es im Firefox und Opera Browser getestet und es ist bei beiden Browsern so. Vielen Dank schon mal für eine kleine Hilfestellung, wie ich das Problem lösen kann. Volker

Volker Buchwald

Hello,
I'm just getting started with HTProtect.app. After everything went smoothly yesterday following registration and setting up the first websites, today I’m stuck because I can’t get rid of the device access permission window (see attached screenshot). When I click the "Allow" button, nothing happens and I have no idea what I might be missing. I’ve tried it in both Firefox and Opera, and it’s the same in both browsers.

Thanks in advance for any tips on how to fix this.

Volker

Pascal

Hi Volker,

I just tested it successfully in Chrome.

On the left, logged in with the stored signing key – on the right, an incognito session. After clicking "approve" on the left, the approval modal closed.

I'm checking what the issue might be and will get back to you shortly.

The duplication definitely looks suspicious – you might have actually "caused" –> found a bug. 🙂

Cheers
Pascal

Pascal

Thanks - you really found a bug: your device was partially registered twice. That's fixed now. Were you able to grant access now?

Volker Buchwald

Hi Pascal,

Thanks a lot for your quick reply and for looking into the cause.

The frozen window with the double message is gone now, and I just tried again.

At the top it now says: This browser can’t remotely control your pages yet > Set up device

I clicked the button and the "Authorize this device" window popped up. Then I clicked "Register this device." The "Waiting for approval" window opened, and it says I need to confirm approval on a trusted device. But what exactly counts as a "trusted device"? I only use my PC with Firefox for work and have only ever logged into HTProtect.app from this PC.

Using the recovery key I got during registration doesn’t get me anywhere either — I get the error "unwrapWorkspaceKeyWithPassphrase: wrong passphrase or corrupted blob."

So now I’m stuck on this window and can’t move forward. How do I proceed with the approval?

Thanks so much for your help.

Cheers ...

Volker

Pascal

Hi Volker,

Does your Firefox regularly clear its browsing data (on restart)? Any strict security/privacy settings enabled?
Are you sure you saved the Recovery Key correctly and entered it exactly right, without spaces at the start or end? Edit: Although the input actually isn’t sensitive to that (just tested).

The Recovery Key works fine on my 3 test accounts/workspaces.

Basically, it’s designed so you can authorize a browser by clicking from an already authorized browser (for new browsers or phones), or else by using the Recovery Key.

If you don’t have an authorized browser (without the message: “This browser can’t remotely control your sites yet…”) or a working Recovery Key (please test again), I could reset your signing key.

That would mean you’d have to unlink and relink your connected sites once.

Cheers
Pascal

Volker Buchwald

Hello Pascal,

Thanks a lot for getting back to me.

I actually have Firefox set to delete all browsing data on close for security reasons.

I didn’t save the Recovery Key on my PC to just copy and paste it; I only printed it out and then manually entered the key to authorize the browser.

After reading your reply, it occurred to me that maybe the issue was that my key contains the number 0 twice, and maybe those aren’t zeros but the letter O. Since I only have the printed version of the key and was surprised to find that the font used for printing makes it really hard to tell 0 and O apart (you seriously need a magnifying glass), I just swapped the 0s for Os in the key... and... it worked. Sorry I didn’t think of that right away.

Thanks again for your support and for this awesome Joomla extension you developed.

Best regards...

Volker

Pascal

Glad to hear nothing got broken.

The Recovery Key is basically the heart of the whole dashboard – I’m thinking of adding a reminder, like an email an hour after creating the workspace, suggesting to test the Recovery Key on a device that’s not yet trusted.

If someone adds a lot of sites, the effort can get pretty big because each reconnect action has to be done manually in the backend for every connected site.