Re: [PATCH] Saving only the group password in keyring

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 09:15 -0400, Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> First, my apologies for pushing for this, since I believe the
> interested parties are probably already notified through bugzilla on
> this...

So the reason this didn't get merged in the first place is that when
this is used, the auth dialog looks like ass.  Having _3_ buttons there
has confused every user I've ever seen, and makes me read things a few
times whenever I get the dialog.  It's just bad UI.  Plus, it's not
something you can change in the connection editor out-of-band from
authentication.  That's not to say it doesn't fill a need and fix the
bug, but the solution is not one I'd like to have upstream.

Instead, we need a better solution.  We have two passwords, the user
password and the group password.  Each password has 3 different types:

                  u s e r
         |  static  |  unused  | OTP
   ------|----------|----------|------
g  static|     Y    |    Y     |  Y
r  ------|----------|----------|------
o  unused|     Y    |    X     |  ?
u  ------|----------|----------|------
p  OTP   |     Y    |    Y     |  ?
   ------|----------|----------|------

    Legend:
      Y = I've heard of it being used
      X = Pointless
      ? = I don't know if this is used by anyone

The cases where you don't want to save passwords in the keyring are the
OTP/RSA and the "unused" cases.

Here's my solution: for each of the group and user password entries,
have a small popup menu behind each on in the main config dialog like
so:

                  .------------------------.  .------------.
   User Password: | i4mvrl1337&^%          |  | Default  |V|
                  `------------------------'  `------------'
                  .------------------------.  .------------.
  Group Password: | my-GrOuP-PassWORD      |  | Default  |V|
                  `------------------------'  `------------'

Where the combo box has the following items:

   Default     (ie, static password that rarely changes)
   Interactive (ie, RSA dongles)
   Unused      (ie, no password required and nothing saved to keyring)

It always defaults to "Default" (ie, static) so most peoples configs
will work, but you have to option to change it for your config.

Note that Interactive authentication can't be used yet anyway because we
don't support challenge-based authentication that it requires, which
will come after 0.7 when I can rework the VPN cleanup patch I've talked
about before, and will require

If somebody came up with the UI patch to do this, that would be awesome
and I'd commit it.  It would additionally mean adding two keys to the
vpnc plugin's GConf data (user-password-type and group-password-type)
which would then have to be added to the nm-vpnc-service's validation
code and used internally if required, but that's pretty easy.  These
keys would store the password type (as a string) so that the auth dialog
would know when to save which passwords and which password entry widgets
to disable/desensitize when the user had selected "unused".

Thoughts?

Next, we get to add authentication types to the client to support Hybrid
Auth mode.  Not sure if you can use all the normal Xauth stuff (like
interactive) with the hybrid auth mode as well, but I have to assume you
can.

Dan