Chrome's Secure Preferences uses HMAC-signed entries to prevent tampering, but the signing seed lives at /tmp/chrome_pref_hash_seed.bin and is only created when Chrome itself runs an installer. Third-party installers that patch extensions.settings directly always produce invalid MACs, so Chrome 'self-heals' on every restart by moving the bad entry to tracked_preferences_reset and wiping the extension files. The extension appears installed, works once, then vanishes — making it look like a flaky load bug when it's actually a cryptographic authentication failure.
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