optional user login (screen) similar to BeLogin but homegrown supported

[dcatt]

I know we don't yet possess multi-user capabilities, but having the ability (and requirement) to sign-in upon boot is a good security mechanism (if only a modest deterring one ala Windows 95/98). I can imagine that BeLogin would always just work, but it would be scary if it one day broke due to a Haiku update/upgrade. So I am proposing an implementation similar in vein to BeLogin officially supported out of the box by Haiku.

[humdinger]

FYI, there's a login app in ​Haiku's trunk.

[leavengood]

This is something I'm interested in having too. After the alpha4 release I'll take a look at our login app code and maybe work on this, depending on how much work is needed.

[leavengood]

Taking a quick look at the code it seems pretty good, we probably just need to include it in the image and have an easy way to turn it on and set a password. It even allows for embedding replicants in the background window. Another François gem hiding in our repo.

[axeld]

If security is a concern, you might want to use DriveEncryption's ability to decrypt and mount any volume you want to via login (it also comes with its own Login application). For example, I use that to mount a volume that contains passwords, mails, etc.

For the concerns of the current Haiku, I think it would be nice to have François' Login as an optional package.

We could let the Bootscript call a user specific Loginscript instead of launching any user applications like Tracker. That would possibly ease installing something like Login.

[SeanCollins]

Replying to axeld:

If security is a concern, you might want to use DriveEncryption's ability to decrypt and mount any volume you want to via login (it also comes with its own Login application). For example, I use that to mount a volume that contains passwords, mails, etc.

Sorry to clutter the ticket. DriveEncyrption ? didn't know a thing about it. This would be great to have if this is a truecrypt like utility, but only for selected data like the home folder ?

anyways more infomration about this utility would be greatly appreciated.

[leavengood]

Replying to SeanCollins:

Sorry to clutter the ticket. DriveEncyrption ? didn't know a thing about it. This would be great to have if this is a truecrypt like utility, but only for selected data like the home folder ?

anyways more infomration about this utility would be greatly appreciated.

​http://haikuware.com/directory/view-details/utilities/command-line-shell/driveencryption

I'm tempted to start writing blog posts detailing some of the neat software we already have for Haiku. People like to complain about what software we don't have, but there are still quite a few gems out there.

[axeld]

It's on ​GitHub btw. I'm currently in the process to make it compatible with TrueCrypt 7 again (so that it can read newer TrueCrypt volumes as well). The current version is much faster than the last released one, as it makes better use of SMP.

SeanCollins wrote:

This would be great to have if this is a truecrypt like utility, but only for selected data like the home folder ?

No, it's exactly like TrueCrypt, and only encrypts complete containers (ie. a drive image or a complete partition). Encryption of just a folder would be nice, too, though, and it's also not too hard to do (look at EncFS for Linux).