Bug 27788

Summary:	Polkit has strange behavior with empty password
Product:	PolicyKit	Reporter:	Radek Novacek <rnovacek>
Component:	daemon	Assignee:	David Zeuthen (not reading bugmail) <zeuthen>
Status:	RESOLVED NOTOURBUG	QA Contact:	David Zeuthen (not reading bugmail) <zeuthen>
Severity:	minor
Priority:	medium	CC:	oliver.henshaw
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Radek Novacek 2010-04-22 00:25:05 UTC

When root password is empty (for example on live-cd) policykit sometimes shows authentication dialog and sometimes it does not. If dialog appears it cannot be confirmed with empty or nonempty password. This happens with both polkit-gnome and polkit-kde authentication agents so I think the problem is in polkit itself somewhere.

More information can be found here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=530456

Polkit version: 0.96

Comment 1 David Zeuthen (not reading bugmail) 2011-02-23 05:50:53 UTC

It's up to the authentication agent (which could be one of polkit-gnome, polkit-kde or, now, gnome-shell - or even ) to avoid putting up an authentication dialog if no information is requested - e.g. until one of the signals ::show-info, ::show-error, ::request from the PolkitAgentSession type has been emitted:

 http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/polkit/PolkitAgentSession.html#PolkitAgentSession.signals

Notably gnome-shell's new polkit authentication agent suffers from this problem - I've filed https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643062 for it.

Closing as NOTOURBUG since this fix is needed in the authentication agents.

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