how is an XLock effective?

fibbi · 10-12-2004, 11:50 PM

Hey,

I was just wondering how an xlock (either with xlock or something more DE specific like KDE's locking feature) is at all effective. I can just sit down, ctrl-alt-f1 to go to the vterm session that's running the x display, send a sig-int, and then either have shell for that person or run a startx and get full X. Is there some feature, setting, or point I'm missing?

Thanks.

jtshaw · 10-13-2004, 12:45 AM

Kinda.... for one... you have to be able to log in on that vterm to do that. Two, if you can't log in as root you shouldn't be able to send a SIGINT (or any other signal) to X. Three, if you can log in as root you really should have the power to knock somebody off anyway... After all, some people forget and walk off leaving a terminal locked.

Of course, I've said it once, I'll say it again. No system is totally secure (yet) if somebody can get physical access to the machine.

fibbi · 10-13-2004, 08:40 AM

err... I mean that the person can switch over to the tty that X is running on and hit ctrl c. Whats to stop them from doing that?

mirradric · 10-13-2004, 08:53 AM

You don't even need to do that. You're thinking too hard... Just ctrl-alt-backsp and proof.. X is gone. One trick is to use a login manager, like KDM, GDM, that doesn't require a tty to start X Antother is to run startX in the background and logout using this combo startx & exit

edit: ok on a second reading I don't find this funny any more... I'll try to check my humour the next time round...