Switching users should require password authentication

Bug #1314750 reported by Thanatermesis
266
This bug affects 3 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Light Display Manager
New
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

If you run "dm-tool switch-to-user foo", it requests a password for login in the new user, but after this, you can switch back and forth among those users without password requested anymore, this is a security problem, users should be not able to access to each other without any authentication

Think about this scenario: you have a laptop with your user, there's a new coworker that needs to use the computer and so you create him an account, since you don't want to close your opened applications you use "dm-tool switch-to-user" command for keep them opened, so your coworker can use the computer on his environment, you need to leave the room to do some works outside, your coworker can access entirely to your system by just running the same command

information type: Private Security → Public Security
Revision history for this message
Rene Herman (rene.herman) wrote :

This is seemingly the same issue as:

http://forums.mate-desktop.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3043 ('LightDM + MATE: How to lock screen on switch user?')

which I posted in the MATE forums. That is, the issue seems to be that I, Thanatermesis and no doubt quite a few others expect a user-switch to automatically lock the user (or "seat" I believe I should say) that is being switched away from, and experience this not being so as a security issue. Given that I do moreover not consider myself generally clueless, I believe it it; there's going to be quite a few users that fall for this one...

I have however noticed that it was the same with LXDM and probably with GDM and therefore expect it to be design. Even if that is true, could LightDM grow an option to enable autmatic lock-on-switch-user? And set it by default, I'd say, but that's an opinion...

Revision history for this message
Rene Herman (rene.herman) wrote :

NB: At the mate-desktop link, someone just posted that things work as I would've expected on Gentoo, so while I'm quite unsure how this might be a distribution issue. I'm on Arch Linux.

Revision history for this message
Rene Herman (rene.herman) wrote :

Possible/probable duplicate:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/lightdm/+bug/904006

Comments there would seem to imply that it is presumed to be our own [desktop environment's] responsibilility to lock. If so... given that a number of environments seem to not take this responsibility, I'd still very much say we need an option to make LightDM do this. The current situation seems to make little sense to a non-little number of users and developpeers...

Revision history for this message
Rene Herman (rene.herman) wrote :

As to the non-little number of envuironments: Gnome-classic, MATE and Xfce are now implied...

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