Investigate multiple prompting for secure storage key

[elizabethengelman]

Related to this comment #2230 (comment)

We have seen the keychain / secure store prompting the user for their password multiple times for one command on stellar keys generate, stellar keys public-key and stellar contract invoke. Though recently I've noticed that that is inconsistent.

With older keys, I am still seeing the multiple prompting when fetching the public-key. But with newly created keys, that is not happening - I am not being prompted for permission to access the key at all.

[mootz12]

I've seen this consistently with a new secure store key on macos.

The prompting begins before simulation, and occurs multiple times before we reach the signing stage.

It can be bypassed with Allow Always (might be the source of the inconsistencies?), but once ledger's are supported this issue will probably be a blocker

cc @janewang / @sagpatil for prioritization

[elizabethengelman]

Good call @mootz12 - the Allow Always may be the source of the inconsistencies.

Just for reference, we have a ticket for supporting ledger devices in for auth entry signing here: #1872

[elizabethengelman]

Just adding some notes while I work through this.

There are a few reasons we are getting so many prompts when accessing info from the Secure Store keys:

• In the key config we aren't storing the public key, but only the seed phrase. So every time we access the public key we are deriving it from the seed phrase, which we have to fetch from the keychain.
• There are two different paths we're using (in invoke for example) that access the public key:
  • getting the account details
  • signing the tx
• In signer.sign_tx_hash we were creating a new access point to the SecureStore for each action (getting the public key, signing the tx) which prompted twice for each fn call. One smallish solution could be to cache the seed_phrase on the SecureStore access point (StellarEntry) so it can be reused. This elimiated 2 of the prompts for invoke - and is in Fix/secure store prompting #2313
• For Mac OS (not sure about other OS yet) every time you access data stored in the secure store is prompts twice: once to alert the user that a process is accessing the keychain, and another to alert the user that the process is using a piece of data