Mounting an encrypted volume presents the volume to all users on a machine

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2010-10-26 at 15:10 -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 13:16:41 -0600,
>   "Nathanael D. Noblet" <nathanael at gnat.ca> wrote:
> > 
> > Just out of curiosity... when are these being mounted? If we are talking 
> > about mounting a partition from a user session that's one thing and can 
> > easily make it user only accessible with a checkbox I guess. I'm 
> > wondering though, when you plug in a USB thumbdrive... don't all users 
> > have access? What's the difference here? Are we talking about system 
> > wide mounts like mine where only /home is encrypted??
> 
> This is where we should be going. Encryption is really irrelavent. 

Not necessarily. There's a case that the automount behaviour for an
encrypted volume should be different from that of a non-encrypted
volume. As I read it, it's also technically plausible, because you can
know with 100% accuracy which user should have access to the encrypted
volume - the user from whose session the passphrase was entered. This is
not the case with unencrypted volumes.

> The issue
> should be if a removable device is inserted, who should have access to it
> if it gets automounted. I would expect encrypted and unencrypted devices
> to get the same treatment. The encrypted devices do already have a pop up,
> so maybe that makes it not as much effort to ask a question when the device
> is mounted. But I don't see otherwise why one would want to treat encrypted
> and uncrypted removable devices differently.

There's a technical issue; see above. And I can see a reasonable user
expectation that on a multi-user system an encrypted volume should be
mounted accessible only to the user who entered the passphrase, to be
honest.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
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