Opinions about boinc reads on /dev/input/event9

[Germano Massullo]

Good day. I am one of the boinc-client maintainers, and I am writing
to you to ask an opinion about bugreport
<<SELinux is preventing boinc_client from 'getattr' accesses on the
chr_file /dev/input/event9>> [1]

In a few words, boinc-client to check user inactivity time, reads
keyboard events from /dev/input/event9
SELinux maintainers said that boinc-client maintainers have to take a
decision about denying or allowing such behaviour.
I tried to ask in boinc's forum (in the mailing list very often you do
not get an answer), so I opened forum topic [2]. They confirmed that
boinc uses /dev/input/event9 to check user inactivity time.
Since boinc-client source code is open, but source code of boinc
working units is not available, I don't know if boinc-client should be
allowed to make such readings...

What is your opinion?

Have a nice day and thank you for your time.



[1]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1337607
[2]: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=11041

P.S. By my mistake I have already unsuccessfully sent an email to
security(a)lists.fedoraproject.org but I wanted to sent an e-mail to
security-team(a)lists.fedoraproject.org so please apologize me if there
will be two discussions

[Florian Weimer]

On 06/10/2016 11:40 PM, Germano Massullo wrote:
>  Good day. I am one of the boinc-client maintainers, and I am writing
>  to you to ask an opinion about bugreport
>  <<SELinux is preventing boinc_client from 'getattr' accesses on the
>  chr_file /dev/input/event9>> [1]
>
>  In a few words, boinc-client to check user inactivity time, reads
>  keyboard events from /dev/input/event9 
The desktop environment already needs to do this for the screen saver. 
Perhaps this information can be made accessible over D-Bus (if not is 
not yet available).

Thanks,
Florian

[Germano Massullo]

Thank you Florian, I just contacted upstream developers, giving them a
suggestion about how to implement user idle time detection in systemd
based Linux distributions
https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/issues/1187#issuecomment-225699768