On Mon, Dec 2, 2019 at 10:45 AM John M. Harris Jr <johnmh(a)splentity.com> wrote:
On Monday, December 2, 2019 9:48:05 AM MST Przemek Klosowski via devel wrote:
> On 11/27/19 2:59 AM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 26, 2019 at 09:39:59AM -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
> >> Mayyyybee systemd-homed is in
> >> a position to solve this by having early enough authentication
> >> capability by rescue.target time that any admin user can login?
> >
> > Actually, it may. Things are confusing here, because systemd-homed is
> > implemented together with changes to how user metadata querying is done:
> > instead of using dbus, a brokerless and much simpler varlink query is
> > used.
> > That last part is what would be relevant to early-boot logins, because
> > less services need to be up to bring up the user session.
>
> There's one tricky feature of homed : remote login (ssh) is only
> possible after an initial local login. It is OK for his intended use (a
> personal laptop/tablet client), except for corner cases like a remotely
> accessed personal desktop in the basement that might get rebooted e.g.
> for updates, resulting in an accidental lockout.
Basically, systemd-homed is useless for any power user, but might be useful
for people just getting into GNU/Linux, who don't use ssh yet or don't have
more than one system.
I disagree with all of this, including the predisposition that this
limitation can't be worked around somehow. I ssh into various laptops
around the home office on a daily basis, I'm not going to give that
up. Based on the systemd-homed presentation, slides, and the early
code review happening, it addresses a number of concerns the
Workstation WG has in making forward progress to secure user data by
default.
It's almost 2020, and I shouldn't have to pick and choose between
remote access and securing user data at rest by default. We surely can
have our cake and eat it too.
--
Chris Murphy