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by withinboredom 2224 days ago
No, it’s just that they’re becoming more popular. When you become a popular desktop OS, governments and militaries want to start using it which comes with some strange requirements. It also means that you can’t rely on “obscurity” to provide any sort of security, where before you could overlook some things.
1 comments
catalogia 2224 days ago
Can you cite any sources for your claim that these things are being implemented to satisfy government/military requirements?
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o-__-o 2224 days ago
DISA?

I don’t know why grand op is downvoted. DoD requirements literally require a timeout setting for screensavers to begin locking. This has caught systems which have a race condition where you can move your mouse quickly and gain desktop access before it locks.

The long term effects come from the required changes to the development security model to remain productive and profitable (took MSFT a few OOB hotfixes and service packs to fix that example above, look when gnome kde xscreensaver etc introduced that feature etc)

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saagarjha 2224 days ago
> This has caught systems which have a race condition where you can move your mouse quickly and gain desktop access before it locks.

I fail to see how this is a race condition rather than how a screensaver is supposed to work?

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o-__-o 2224 days ago
Because it’s not, that’s why I pointed to xscreensaver feature implementation. Lock time is separate from screensaver activation time which is separate from energy saving activation time.

What defines when a locking screen saver is “locked”? 10m? Or 10m1s? You are making assumptions and that is what DISA spells out. Which forces the OS design to change in subtle ways. Like xattrs on files as great grand op was alluding to.

Does that provide clarity into how development security models evolve over the lifetime of an application?

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