Hi,
I'm part of the people working on Tails, a live distribution that aims at preserving privacy and anonymity: https://tails.boum.org/. Tails is currently lacking a screen locker and this has been a frequent feature request. See https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/5684.
For example, as Tails is been adopted more and more by journalists, they want to be able to leave their computer unattended in their office to go to the toilets for a minute and have their screen locked.
I'm writing this emails to various Live distributions based on Debian (Knoppix, Grml, Jondo, Kali, Debian Live, and Tanglu). I'm also putting Micah Lee in copy as he has shown particular interest in this feature.
I've been investigating the screen locking mechanism of those various Debian based live distributions, and I found out that none of them had a real mechanism to do so. They either:
- Do not provide any screen locking mechanism (Knoppix, Grml, Jondo Live). - Either rely on their default password to unlock the screen (Kali, Tanglu, Debian Live).
The purpose of this email is to know whether you would be interested in working on a common Debian package to provide a generic screen locking solution for Debian based live distributions.
The core usability issue that we are facing here is the one of the unlocking password. As we are live distributions, there either is no password or a default one. Still, screen locking only make sense if the user is able to use a custom password. As an interesting exception, note that in Jondo Live, the user is prompted for a user password on boot. In Tails the user can set up an administration password but this is disabled by default for security reasons so we cannot rely on this for screen locking.
During our last monthly meeting we came up with the idea of asking for a custom password *in the process of locking the screen* for the first time. For example, in GNOME, when doing Meta+L for the first time, the user would be prompted to enter a screen locking password, then only the screen would get locked. If she locks the screen again, the same password would be reused.
What do you think? Please answer to tails-dev@boum.org and feel free to subscribe to the list to follow the thread:
https://mailman.boum.org/listinfo/tails-dev/