Re: Password protection

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:07:03 +0200 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote: 

LMI> Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:
>> Look at it the other way: why shouldn't they set up a GPG agent or enter
>> a passphrase?  (assuming that entering the passphrase more than once is
>> a bug I plan to fix)

LMI> Entering a pass phrase (once) is fine if they've chosen to set things up
LMI> like that.  Firefox also allows the passwords to be, er,
LMI> password-protected.  :-)

Right.  So the usability issues are the same.

LMI> But setting up a GPG agent is way too much for a normal user.  I think.

I really don't think you can get reasonable security without a
passphrase entry at some point.  The GPG agent is securely written to do
this.  The Secrets API (about which I wrote some proposals you skipped)
is also much more secure than Emacs can be and makes it unnecessary to
enter any passphrases, being keyed to your user login.

>> So I'd argue that Emacs has, practically speaking, better security
>> *externally* than Firefox, Chrome, or most other web browsers with a
>> authinfo.gpg file.  Now from the inside, yes, it's a candy store of
>> passwords, and that's a concern.  But Doing It Right requires a lot of
>> infrastructure that Emacs Lisp doesn't have.  And Firefox and Chrome
>> extensions can get at your passwords too AFAIK.

LMI> Yeah.  A `process-send-password' function makes the candy somewhat less
LMI> tasty, I think...

As I said, the Secrets API implements exactly this and is available
through auth-source.el without any C code required.  What doesn't it do?

Ted