Failed X11 authentication does the wrong thing

[Nicolas Williams]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2001 at 02:29:19PM -0500, Dave Dykstra wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 26, 2001 at 12:00:54PM -0700, Darren Moffat wrote:
> ...
> > I've also written a PAM module for use with su that uses xauth to
> > make a copy of the cookie for the current DISPLAY out of the src users
> > .Xauthority and put it into the destination users .Xauthority.  This a
> > safe way to do it - if I ever get the time I'll update the PAM module
> > to remove the cookie from the .Xauthority when the session exits.
> 
> Interesting, but not necessarily safe, if a group of people share the login
> you su to.  It's too bad that the xauth magic cookie can't be in an
> environment variable.  On the other hand, I think some systems make it easy
> for other people to dump out your environment variables so that would be no
> good either.

Ideally the X libs would support the same sort of concept as the
ssh-agent but for accessing X cookies.

In fact, I'd really like to see an all-purpose agent along the lines of
ssh-agent, but not just for SSH keys: Kerberos ccaches, X cookies, NTLM
hashes (think about Samba's smbsh/smbwrapper) and so on.

> - Dave Dykstra


Nico
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