Tails

#7 Updated by intrigeri 2018-09-19 15:08:15

I’m wondering if we’re looking at the right target: if I got it right, what we need is not really mounting drives automatically, it’s giving the user clear feedback about the fact they’ve plugged something that was recognized by the system as external storage, and giving the user a way to open said storage in one click, without having to find where the *%! Tails has hidden it. I suspect we’re looking at this through the automount vs. not-automount prism only because this is the configuration means that current GNOME exposes via a boolean setting. But I’d like to propose a third way :)

Here’s what I would find ideal: when plugging in an external storage medium, don’t mount it (like Tails does currently) but display a notification about it (just like GNOME does by default) that offers to mount and open it in Files. Same for encrypted storage modulo s/mount/unlock and mount/. This way, we get the UX we want without the security regression nor the corresponding change management work.

Implementation wise, I don’t know if GNOME upstream could be convinced to do this by default, or at least support opting-in for this behaviour; given the current setting is a boolean, it does not seem trivial to add support for a first value (such as “propose” or “ask”). On Feature #15628 segfault mentioned something about the GVfs monitor but I don’t know if that’s the only component involved here. https://sources.debian.org/src/gnome-shell/3.30.0-1/js/ui/components/automountManager.js/ suggests that GNOME Shell is involved too.

#8 Updated by sajolida 2018-09-20 01:55:33

> Here’s what I would find ideal: when plugging in an external storage medium, don’t mount it (like Tails does currently) but display a notification about it (just like GNOME does by default) that offers to mount and open it in Files. Same for encrypted storage modulo s/mount/unlock and mount/.

I like that!

#10 Updated by intrigeri 2019-01-23 13:28:53

I don’t think that it’s the right time to propose this to GNOME given the work they’re doing on having a USB “firewall” (Feature #9569). Once we have that USB firewall, we can probably enable auto-mount without too many second thoughts.