Re: gscreensaver :: a bit of a mockup

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

Hey,

On Tue, 2004-05-04 at 18:19, Davyd Madeley wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-05-04 at 13:11 -0400, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> 
> > Also, what will happen when the PAM module in use doesn't utilize
> > passwords?  Or uses multiple passwords?  Or whatever?
> 
> Obviously these are all issues that will have to be dealt with in the
> design.
> In fact, to be perfectly honest, I have no idea how xscreensaver deals
> with those things now. Ideally, I want to hook into gdm to do my authing
> (so that xscreensaver has no privledges).
> 
> How does gdm handle more non-standard auth methods?

	We had a brief related discussion about this the other day and the
general feeling was:

  * Most applications using PAM assume that authentication is done by 
    username and password

  * There may be some support out there for smartcard type 
    authentication in applications but its certainly not implemented 
    everywhere

  * Things get complicated with a challenge-response authentication 
    scheme which some card based authentication schemes are based on - 
    think about things like one time passwords generated using a 
    challenge from the server. Most applications don't have support for 
    such schemes

	I had a recollection that someone had worked on smartcard
authentication support in gdm before but a brief look at GDM isn't
showing me anything obvious.

Cheers,
Mark.