2020-06-June Tech Advisory

Known Issues

Issue #1: Smartcrypt Lockers Fail to Initialize

Short Description of Issue: 

The 16.50.0007 client fails to create an instance of a locker when the PKWARE Enterprise Manager does not have Global Discovery Settings defined or loaded for the environment.

Detailed Description of Issue:

The PKWARE Enterprise Manager delivers system-wide settings for some of the behaviors of the Smartcrypt Data Discovery engine. New in the 18.6.163 release is the ability to define performance profiles per endpoint. When no performance profile is defined for a given endpoint, the PKWARE Enterprise Manager will deliver the default performance profile to the Smartcrypt Client. These variables control how all endpoints running Locker and Assignments behave and control their access to system resources on the endpoint. Without the settings defined or loaded for the environment, the PKWARE Enterprise Manager will not communicate any values global settings to the Smartcrypt Client. The Smartcrypt Client will then combine the performance policies and the global discovery settings to produce the rules to run by on each client. 

With the 16.50.0007 Smartcrypt Client and the 18.6.163 PKWARE Enterpise Manager, a defect occurs which leaves the Smartcrypt Client with an uninitialized value when no Global Discovery Settings are loaded. When the uninitialized value occurs, the Smartcrypt Locker will fail to run and report compliance and status failures similar to the screenshot below:

The client diagnostic log will show something like this:

ERROR 08/10/20 17:40:02 <5292> [FilterHandler.cpp:214] FilterHandler: scanning priority is invalid type
ERROR 08/10/20 17:40:02 <5292> [RemediationManager.cpp:100] RemediationManager: Filter handler failed to parse update json

In addition to the defect leaving the Locker uninitialized, the Discovery Agent scanning priority fails to read and follow the value defined in the PKWARE Enterprise Manager. 

Description of Workarounds:

To workaround the issue of the locker not being able to initialize, the PKWARE Enterprise Manager needs to have loaded Discovery Global Settings. This can be done by opening the Discovery page in the PKWARE Enterprise Manager and changing one of the Global Discovery Settings. The act of modifying a setting will force the PKWARE Enterprise Manager to load the settings into memory and communicate with the Smartcrypt clients. If the Global Discovery Settings have been changed in the past, they will already exist in the PKWARE Enterprise Manager. This issue is most likely to occur in new Smartcrypt deployments.

There is no work around for the defect with the Smartcrypt Client not reading and following the Discovery Agent priority defined in the PKWARE Enterprise Manger and Performance Policies. The Client will run the Smartcrypt Discovery Agent scanning threads at a low priority.

Detection of the Issue:

To confirm that the Discovery Global Settings are loaded in your environment before upgrading or before making a Locker, you can check your local meta data for the settings. Open the PKWARE metadata folder located in your %LOCALAPPDATA%\PKWARE\.meta folder and look for the persists-.json file. Open the file in a text editor such as notepad and look for the following search term: "discoverySettings"

If you have Discovery Global Settings in your environment, you should find something like this:  

{\"discoverySettings\":{\"checkVersion\":false,\"scanAlternateData\":true,\"scanMetadata\":true,\"scanningPriority\":\"Normal\",\"targetOfficeContent\":true}