Re: GNOME keyring unlocking

[p10 <pditchev gmail com>]

On Thu, 2013-10-10 at 14:05 +0100, fox_aaawkq wrote:
> On Thu, 2013-10-10 at 13:13 +0300, p10 wrote:
> > if you're going to enter your password after 5 seconds anyway, which
> > makes this feature incompatible with "Online accounts" .
>
> My solution is to use two keyrings. I have a passwordless keyring for IM
> and other stuff that is accessed immediately on auto-login.
>       Then I have a protected keyring that stores the passwords for
> Evolution, encrypted folders and other things I want to keep secure.
>       This means I only need to enter the password when I open Evolution or
> something protected, and not immediately everytime I turn the machine
> on. Which also means I can give it to a friend and let them browse the
> internet or whatever without worrying about them accessing private data.
>
> You seem to be under the impression that auto-login should in some way
> be just as secure, without any form of authentication. If you don't need
> to enter a password, then it doesn't matter what technical wizardry you
> use to unlock the keyring, all someone needs to do is turn your computer
> on, and they have full access to your stuff.
>       You must either choose to have your data protected or unprotected.
> Using the two keyring mechanism, like me, you can choose that on a more
> fine-grained level, rather than having to make everything unprotected
> though.

The idea is that nobody has physical access to my machine . It's at
home , it doesn't have some nuclear-rocket-schematics-like information ,
and that's why I'm not afraid to leave automatic login on . The problem
is that if someone manages to hack his way into my account/computer (say
there's some SSH/VNC/Bittorrent sync/whatever else vulnerability) I
don't want my passwords in plain text. So here's the use cases : 
1.Full security , no decryption keys stored on the computer in any form
- the encrypted stuff cannot be decrypted even if someone takes your
computer physically and examines it.
2.Sanitary root space , not so air-tight user space - assuming the
machine is not going to get physically stolen the active account is
non-administrative in theory no bad code is going to have root
clearance . So the keyring in user-space can be encrypted by a key in
root-space , handled by a trusted program on startup.

That's my current "security setup" - a user account that I use for
everything , and 'su' into root with a password I don't keep stored
anywhere , so that even if I happen to execute bad code , or get my
account password otherwise hacked the attacker is confined to that
user-space. 

Now the problem from here on is the following (I thought I had it
figured out but I caught my own bad logic) : if a root service unlocks
the key-ring for all the user-space programs - there's no point in
having the system in the first place . So that is a problem that if I'm
not mistaken stands with the current setup too - if you unlock the
keyring every user-space app can access the stored passwords . (?) 
 Ideally certain apps would get access to certain keys .

Petko