[PATCH] dbus-spec: introduce new PERMIT_INTERACTIVE_AUTHENTICATION

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 03.09.14 19:02, Thiago Macieira (thiago at kde.org) wrote:

> I save downloads more often than I need polkit authentication.

Well, I am not sure that that's really true. Note that most of the
polkit auth actions are by default set to simply "yes" or "no". Pretty
much most of our plumbing layer components (i.e. everything that owns
a name on the system bus) uses polkit, and wants a flag like
this. This is probably not so much in your focus, but polkit is in
play for all of this, transparently to unpriviliged userspace. It's
all of the systemd components (logind, timedated, hostnamed, machined,
systemd itself, localed, ...) and I am pretty sure KDE uses those too
right? It's also udisks, NM, upower and all the other
things... Something like polkit is kinda a *necessity* if you want to
allow unpriviliged users access to priviliged operations, and we
should provide good, and relatively straightforward infrastructure for
this.

> > Also see the example I gave in the other mail, that it matters why
> > client need to be able to know that it is interactive *auth* that they
> > disable, nothing else.
> 
> I must have missed that. How will the callee react to a call that needs 
> authentication but didn't specify the flag (that is, 100% of the calls being 
> placed today)?

Many of the existing APIs have an explicit flag for this crrently, for
example timedate/hostnamed/localed do. THis is very cumbersome though,
and I'd like to move this a layer down.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat