Nitrokey3 unusable, CHANNEL_BUSY

Hello world,

my Nitrokey3 used to work for a while. GnuPG integration still appears to work but FIDO2 is failing. Whenever I get prompted to touch the device it does not blink and does not react to touches. It just briefly blinks blue when I unplug and replug it.

Tested with:

  • Chromium (chrome://settings/securityKeys)
  • webauthn.io

It appears like the stick crashes and requires replugging to boot it again.
After plugging it in and waiting a few seconds I get can its status:

nitropy nk3 status
Command line tool to interact with Nitrokey devices 0.4.39
UUID: 10148E5…
Firmware version: v1.5.0
Init status: ok
Free blocks (int): 27
Free blocks (ext): 467
Variant: LPC55

However when I ask for the status repeatedly this command seems stuck. When I Ctrl-C and retry I get:

nitropy nk3 status
Command line tool to interact with Nitrokey devices 0.4.39
Critical error:
An unhandled exception occurred
Exception encountered: CtapError(‘CTAP error: 0x06 - CHANNEL_BUSY’)


Critical error occurred, exiting now
Unexpected? Is this a bug? Would you like to get support/help?

Anything I can try to isolate the cause?

…Christoph

1 Like

I had the same and had to unplug it … no idea what went wrong

Thanks for the reply. I actually did that a couple of times before I gave up.

Now interestingly after letting the topic rest for a few days it starts to work again. I’m a huge fan of the idea of Nitrokey but I’m not sure if I want to rely on it yet.