This repository contains documentation, configuration and programs for implementing different polkit security profiles in SUSE Linux distributions.

polkit is a security framework that allows applications to authenticate privileged operations. The details of authentication can be configured in a fine-grained way via polkit policies and rules. While all this is fine feature wise polkit is not known for its user friendliness.

To help users to configure different security levels, polkit-default-privs provides a mechanism to switch between sets of predefined polkit security settings that are targeted towards different usage scenarios. For detailed information please refer to the shipped man pages.

This is a short overview of the elements contained in this repository:

• The chkstat and set_polkit_default_privs scripts perform runtime configuration of selected polkit profiles.
• The files in the profile directory contain the actual polkit rules for actions in the different security profiles.
• The sysconfig file contains a configuration template that will be merged into /etc/sysconfig/security during rpm installation. These configuration values determine the behaviour of chkstat and set_polkit_default_privs.

The Makefile is used to build documentation and install files in an installation root. This is used to package the files in an openSUSE package found in Base:System/polkit-default-privs on https://build.opensuse.org.

polkit-default-privs is also used as a whitelisting mechanism in SUSE Linux distributions to prevent new polkit actions to enter the distribution without a code review. Only packages that have an entry in the polkit-default-privs profiles will be considered whitelisted.

The polkit-default-privs are part of the base installation of all SUSE Linux distributions. This means that the polkit settings in SUSE Linux distributions often diverge from defaults shipped by upstream developers, depending on the settings in our profiles and the profile selected by the administrator of a system. Sadly upstream software is not always well prepared to deal with diverging polkit settings which can lead to a bad user experience or even broken software in extreme cases. We are trying to catch theses cases and patch our packages or improve upstream code.

The current maintainer of polkit-default-privs is the SUSE security team reachable by email via [email protected]. If you have an issue then please open a bug via bugzilla.suse.com, assigning it to [email protected].