On Sun, 17 Aug 2014 19:22:58 +0100
David Brodie <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 17/08/14 14:09, Hazel Russman wrote:
> > I am running BLFS7.5 with systemd. I also have polkit installed and am 
> > using lxpolkit as my graphical authentication agent. I don't have a display 
> > manager; I start up my Fluxbox desktop with startx.
> >
> > On a console I can power off or reboot without giving a password because I 
> > am the sole user of the system. But when I do the same thing in X, either 
> > from a terminal or using the Fluxbox menu, I get asked to authenticate. I 
> > can use my own password as I am a member of the wheel group, but it's still 
> > an extra step that I could do without. How do I configure polkit to work 
> > the same way in X as in the console?
> > Am I not an "active user" when I'm in X?
> >
> 
> Roughly speaking, logind (and its predecessor, consolekit) only 
> considers you to be in an active session if it is invoked from a trusted 
> login client, e.g. a display manager, such as GDM, or PAM (with 
> provisos), otherwise there's a serious security hole (e.g. it can't even 
> tell if you are local or remote, and a remote (e.g. via ssh) user 
> shouldn't be allowed to initiate an active local session). Therefore, if 
> you just use plain startx, it will not mark the session as active.
> 
> See this Debian bug report for more info:
> 
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=747882
> 
> The easiest work-around (at least for consolekit, and presumably also 
> for logind) is probably to override the polkit policy file with a rule 
> file in /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/, as described in the polkit man page. 
> (And ditto for suspend/hibernate if you use them, and anything else 
> using polkit)
> 
> David
> 
But is that a safe thing to do given your earlier remarks? I don't want to 
introduce a security hole into my system.  

-- 
Hazel Russman <[email protected]>
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