John Plocher wrote:

> What are the statistics on the cookie stealing incidents we are 
> experiencing?
> What was their explicit impact? Their potential impact? (i.e., is this a 
> theoretical or real problem?)

We have no sure way of knowing.  And the trick with security is to shut 
the stable door before the horse has bolted.

>> re-supply their passwords when doing any security-critical operations 
>> such as registering a new SSH key or changing their password
> 
> Yahoo & google force password entry at other points as well - 
> effectively, if it has been "too long" since you reauth'd, any "change 
> my info" operation triggers one - where too long is (IIRC) between 
> several hours and 2 weeks.
> 
> I don't expect most people will be doing activities on the site as often as
> you presume (between one and four hours) - while *some* people live on 
> os.o,
> I would guess that the vast majority revisit on a daily or weekly (or 
> longer)
> basis. [this would be a good place for some real data]

We do have login information in the current database, but as logins are 
permanent if you set the 'remember me' flag the data isn't really all 
that useful.

> (I get my os.o email in Thunderbird or via GMail, I do most of my 
> interactions
> with genunix's wiki and hg; I hit up OS.o with my browser only 
> infrequently,
> daily to a couple of times a week. I'd be pretty turned off if I was 
> forced to
> relogin every one of those times.)
> 
> II predict that an inactivity logout of less than a week or so would be 
> a huge dissatisfier for the majority of casual OS.o users.

You'll only have to log in if you want to change anything, which 
immediately excludes most casual users.

>> although this will of course be configurable.
> 
> As long as it can be set to things like "2 weeks", "1 month" or even 
> "never"...

It will most probably be a small number of hours, and certainly not more 
than a day.

-- 
Alan Burlison
--
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