Features/PolicyKitOne

Feature Name

PolicyKit 1.0

Summary

PolicyKit provides a flexible framework for granting users access to privileged operations. It is meant to replace the old userhelper approach, and overcome some of its shortcomings. PolicyKit 1.0 addresses architectural shortcomings of the initial PolicyKit design.

Owner

• Name: David Zeuthen

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 12
• Last updated: 2009-05-01
• Percentage of completion: 50%

PolicyKit 0.91 is the current release of the new PolicyKit. See the announcement

David has produced src rpms too [1].

The TODO list for PolicyKit 1.0 can be found here.

Richard has ported PackageKit to the new API (in a branch).

Matthias has produced patches for a number of PolicyKit clients (see below)

Next steps:

• finish DeviceKit-disks port
• write a notification icon
• support for negative authorizations
• port/rewrite the policy editor

Detailed Description

The initial Releases/FeaturePolicyKit as introduced in Fedora 8 has some shortcomings. E.g. it is based on a library with suid helpers. The shortcoming that motivated the rewrite is that it is not possible to integrate it with directory services such as FreeIPA. The new PolicyKit is implemented as a system bus service and has pluggable backends that make it easy to integrate with directory services. It is one of the goals of the Features/SSSD feature to write such a backend. PolicyKit 1.0 itself will ship with a backend that uses the local filesystem to store action definitions and authorizations, similar to the current PolicyKit.

More details can be found in Davids announcement of the PolicyKit 0.90 release.

The current plan is to land the new PolicyKit early in F12 (as soon as it opens up, basically), and have most of the patches ready to port applications. The old PolicyKit 0.9 packages can remain for a while to ease the transition period and will be removed a few months into F12, when all users have been ported.

Benefit to Fedora

Making it possible to manage policies in a central directory service makes Fedora more suitable for larger, centrally managed installations.

As a secondary benefit, the new PolicyKit api is much simpler to work with than the PolicyKit 0.9 api.

Scope

• Package EggDbus, which is a depencency of the new PolicyKit
• Package the new PolicyKit, making it parallel-installable with the current PolicyKit
• Port supporting libraries such as PolicyKit-gnome and PolicyKit-kde to the new PolicyKit or obsolete them
• Complete PolicyKit 1.0, including documentation and porting guide
• Port PolicyKit-using applications to the new PolicyKit:

Package	Status	Bug
NetworkManager		499965
DeviceKit-disks
gnome-disk-utility
DeviceKit-power	untested patch	498695
gnome-power-manager	untested patch	498560
PackageKit	done
gnome-packagekit	done
kpackagekit		499968
hal		499969
libvirt		499970
gnome-system-monitor	untested patch	495730
ConsoleKit	untested patch	495617
gdm	untested patch	498361
pulseaudio	untested patch	497621
control-center	untested patch	498365
fprintd	untested patch	498368
gnome-panel	untested patch	498366
gnome-applets	no mechanism here, should either just drop cpufreq applet or build without polkit
GConf2	untested patch	498370
gnome-session	untested patch	497619
system-config-services	this uses python bindings in python-slip
cups-pk-helper		How To Test Make sure you have polkit and polkit-gnome 0.91 or newer installed. Make sure /usr/libexec/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 is automatically started when you log in Choose a operation that require authorization and are using PolicyKit, e.g. setting the system timezone in the clock applet Try the operation and verify that you get a PolicyKit password dialog according to the policy Test that entering the wrong password does not let you execute the operation Test that entering the correct password lets you execute the operation Verify that the authorization is remembered according to the policy for this operation, and that a statusicon informs you about currently remembered authorizations Verify that you can drop the authorizations from the status icon Try changing the policy for the operation using the policy configuration utility Check that the policy changes are effective immediately Verify that logging out and back in removes all remembered authorizations Repeat these tests with other operations that require authorization, such as storing system connections in nm-applet or changing the default desktop background. User Experience The authentication dialogs that are shown by PolicyKit will change in some aspects. The 'retain authorization' checkboxes will likely go away and be replaced with a status icon in the style of consolehelper-gtk, that lets you inspect and drop your retained authorizations. Dependencies Features/SSSD not a hard dependency, but these two features will benefit from each other Contingency Plan Stay with PolicyKit 0.9 Documentation API documentation can be found here. A porting guide is being assembled here. No user documentation yet. Release Notes Fedora 12 includes PolicyKit 1.0. (Not sure anything else needs to be said here. If anything, might mention the new status icon) Comments and Discussion See Talk:Features/PolicyKitOne