Bug 4513

Summary:	We need a standard 'single sign-on wallet' system working across desktop environments
Product:	freedesktop.org	Reporter:	Tiago Freire <tiago.freire>
Component:	Project Creation Requests	Assignee:	fd.o Admin Massive <sitewranglers>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	high	CC:	esigra, josiah.ritchie
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	Linux (All)
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Tiago Freire 2005-09-19 12:43:43 UTC

There are many different ways of managing passwords. KDE has KWallet, Mozilla  
has its ystem, opera has its own password management too, and so on.  
There is a wishlist/bug in KDE to add Single Sign-On to KWallet. This is going 
to take some time to be addressed, and will only happen in KDE 4.  
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92845 
Gnome had a pam_keychain system to handle passwords, which is unmaintained. 
http://www.flyn.org/projects/pam_keyring/index.html 
From the KDE bug listing they point to an Apple Developer page explaining how 
things work on Mac OS X for an application to access the keychain services. 
What I think is that something like Single Sign On only lives up to its name 
if it is standard across every (or almost) application. Right now we have a 
plethora of password management systems. 
I think FreeDesktop.org is the best suited entity to push a Working Group, 
Inviting KDE/Gnome/XFCE/Enlightenment/Fluxbox/Mozilla/Opera/etc developers to 
talk about it, and get the hands dirty, instead of having everyone reinventing 
the wheel and having incompatible implementations. 
I hope this idea is welcomed in freedesktop.org and embraced by the community!

Comment 1 Tiago Freire 2005-09-19 12:44:32 UTC

The link to the Apple documentation: 
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Security/Conceptual/keychainServConcepts/02concepts/chapter_2_section_1.html

Comment 2 Peter Fischer 2006-11-01 05:01:52 UTC

PAM_KEYRING for GNOME is not dead any more: 
http://www.hekanetworks.com/index.php/publisher/articleview/frmArticleID/25/staticId/31/ 

Perhaps its maintainer is a friendly combatant in the quest for a multiplatform 
password managing framework?

Comment 3 Daniel Stone 2007-03-11 16:46:37 UTC

the bug tracker is not really the place for this -- can you please start a discussion on xdg@lists.freedesktop.org?

Comment 4 Dan Kegel 2009-02-25 14:39:36 UTC

See also bug 16581, which set up a mailing list for discussing this.

For reference, I think the current gnome keyring system is http://live.gnome.org/Seahorse

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