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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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Is using a keyring an insecure thing to do? (feddit.org)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by dieTasse@feddit.org to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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I have a hard time understanding the benefits of the keyring (e.g. GNOME keyring). I get the convenience parts - I don't have to enter password for something every time I want to use it (e.g. mounted encrypted drive) and I don't have to create a secret for some background stuff (applications keys). But the problem is, if I understand it correctly, that every application has the same access to my keyring, so, in theory, a malicious application can just read my Signal key and they can just read all my Signal messages right? Is there a point, then, in encrypting e.g. local database (like Signal) if the key to that database is readily available anyway? Any input is welcome. thanks!

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[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Meanwhile, I'm fighting to get rid of the password on the keyring each time it comes back by itself. For context, my root partition is encrypted, so it's not a huge deal if the keyring stored on it doesn't have its own password, I think. I set up autologin to avoid a duplicate password, but since the session manager no longer unlocks the keyring, the keyring must have no password else I get a password prompt all over again. There's probably a more elegant way, but I've yet to find it.

[–] dieTasse@feddit.org 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Not sure if this is your problem. But if you use encrypted system partition + autologin, it should use the encryption passphrase to auto unlock the keyring after the autologin. That is probably what is happening when you remove the password, on the next login it sets the enc passphrase again, right? Why do you try to remove the password?

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

it should use the encryption passphrase to auto unlock the keyring after the autologin

It doesn't, hence the need to remove the password. Password only comes back every once in a while, rather than every login. Maybe a bad combination of desktop environment/session manager? LightDM with XFCE in my case.

[–] IanTwenty@piefed.social 2 points 4 days ago

Some hints here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GNOME/Keyring#PAM_step

Alternatively, if using GDM and LUKS, GDM can unlock your keyring if it matches your LUKS password. For this to work, you need to use the systemd init in your mkinitcpio.conf as well as the appropriate kernel parameters, and you should make sure that your system's real-time clock is set to UTC rather than local time (see [2]). See [3] for more details.

When using a display manager, the keyring works out of the box for most cases. GDM, LightDM, LXDM, and SDDM already have the necessary PAM configuration. For a display manager that does not automatically unlock the keyring edit the appropriate file instead of /etc/pam.d/login as mentioned below.

[–] dieTasse@feddit.org 1 points 4 days ago

Did you try to set the password the same as your encryption passphrase? But dunno, I have no idea if that works on your combo.