Bug#501812: gnome-keyring: Disable graphical dialog when interacting with a shell

[Josselin Mouette]

Le mardi 24 mars 2009 à 23:36 -0700, Yury Arkady Sobolev a écrit :
> I apologize for barging in on this bug. However, I believe some very
> important points are not being addressed.
> 
> Following the instructions in [1] has no effect. Although, I suppose
> that is an entirely different bug. As far as I can tell, the only way to
> disable the functionality is to move the executable out of the way. This
> is inelegant.

Yes, this is another issue, caused by the GConf move to D-Bus, and it
will be fixed soon.

> There is a large nuisance as well. When the program tries to emulate an
> agent, it tries to be clever and attempts to unlock every key in the
> .ssh directory until it finds one that works. This leads to either the
> user being forced to move his or her keys, having to click deny
> every time, or accepting ssh keys into the login keyring.

I’ve never noticed this behavior. The keyring only unlocks the keys it
actually needs. There is only one exception to this rule: the first time
it unlocks a key, it will have to try all keys since it doesn’t have
metadata on them. This issue is also fixed in 2.26 by using better
heuristics.

> There is a very real security issue here that is being brushed aside.
> The layout of the dialog and the fact that it pops up everytime in an
> obtrusive manner encourages the user to load SSH keys into the login
> keyring. This poses a very strong security risk for users who are not
> used to locking their screens when they walk away from their computer.
> Given the large number of new users in the Linux community, this is a
> concern. Having to enter a passphrase in order to unlock a key is a good
> habit. It reminds the user that there *is* a key that *is* being
> unlocked. If this is done automatically, it _nearly_ defeats the purpose
> of having a passphrase in the first place.

I agree that the “unlock this key on login” checkbox is annoying and
there should be a better way. It’s been on my mind for a while, but I’ve
just opened a report upstream about it:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=576676

Cheers,
-- 
 .''`.      Debian 5.0 "Lenny" has been released!
: :' :
`. `'   Last night, Darth Vader came down from planet Vulcan and told
  `-    me that if you don't install Lenny, he'd melt your brain.
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