gksudo potentially very insecure

[Matthew Thomas]

Eldo Varghese wrote:
>...
> With all this discussion about how to show the sudo status & the amount of
> time left, I was wondering why not put an Icon in the Notification Area
> that popped up and countsdown everytime you sudo, towards the end of the
> timeout (last 5 secs or something more appropriate) the icon flashes red
> every sec and beeps (in an unobtrusive way). Just an idea I am throwing
> out, please pick it apart.
>...

When your battery's about to run out and you're about to lose your
session, you get an alert, but Ubuntu doesn't flash icons and beep at
you. When you're about to format your USB key and lose all the data on
it, you get an alert, but Ubuntu doesn't flash icons and beep at you. So
I think flashing icons and beeping at you for something as boring as
"The time in which you can run admin-only programs without entering your
password is about to run out" would be quite inappropriate.

+1 to what Eric Dunbar said -- don't have a global timeout, have a
per-executable timeout. Furthermore, make the timeout finish instantly
if neither the mouse nor the keyboard are touched for ~20 seconds, in
which case you're either watching a movie (so you don't care) or you've
left your station (so you want the password requirement to return ASAP).

-- 
Matthew Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/