Need an interface to lock the screen

om26er 2017-09-04 15:23:43 UTC #1

I am working on an app that is able to remotely lock the screen of a user. case: you forgot to lock your desktop when you went for lunch/coffee and want to make sure your laptop is locked.

Different desktop environments have different service names to lock the screen:

on KDE: org.kde.screensaver
on Unity and GNOME: org.gnome.ScreenSaver

Regarding path:

on KDE and GNOME: /ScreenSaver
on Unity: /com/canonical/Unity/Session

The dbus interfaces are:

KDE: org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver
Unity: com.canonical.Unity.Session
GNOME: org.gnome.ScreenSaver

I put more organized info here: https://github.com/om26er/linux-desktop-manager/blob/bf55285ef88fdc49f49d238d67bcc4a841e6fefd/ldm/manager.py#L3

zyga 2017-09-04 15:32:15 UTC #2

Thank you, we will investigate the security impact of the interface and either add this to one of the existing interfaces or create a new, dedicated interface.

niemeyer 2017-09-04 20:26:50 UTC #3

@jdstrand Would you be able to give a hand on this one as well?

Is there a reason for us to not expose this with the desktop interface itself, assuming it only allows locking?

jdstrand 2017-09-05 16:46:11 UTC #4

I can look at it. We allow inhibit already so Lock doesn’t seem unreasonable OTOH.

om26er 2017-09-06 14:35:12 UTC #5

Two requirements to make it usable:

Allow to check if screen is locked.
Allow to actually lock the screen.

ogra 2017-09-06 14:57:24 UTC #6

Probably also “inhibit locking” ? (media players usually need that)

jdstrand 2017-12-08 19:17:25 UTC #7

We already have ‘screen-inhibit-control’ in a separate interface, which I think is correct because a snap could inhibit screenlocking and expose users to risk. It makes some sense to then have a corresponding screen-lock interface, but because screen locking actually makes things more secure and we would allow auto-connection, I think it makes more sense to simply add to the desktop interface. We’ll try to get this into 2.30.

jdstrand 2017-12-08 20:56:07 UTC #8

https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/4384 for master and https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/4385 for 2.30.

jdstrand 2017-12-11 13:41:25 UTC #9

These are both committed. Please test the 2.30 core snap when it hits candidate (or test newer versions that have the change in edge/beta) and comment if it doesn’t work for you.

om26er 2018-01-06 19:10:24 UTC #10

Any dates on when 2.30 gets uploaded to Xenial ?