14 DAY TRIAL // KDE developer Bhushan Shah writes on his blog about the latest work done by him on the KDE Plasma desktop environment, especially related to the porting to the next-gen Wayland display server.
According to Mr. Shah, who currently works on the lockscreen integration with the KDE's window manager KWin Wayland session, this is one of the most important parts of the KDE Plasma on Wayland port, and that the X11 lockscreen integration, which is handled by KDE’s session manager KSMServer, is not very secure.
Therefore, in order for the Wayland compositor to be aware that the screen is locked, as well as see what windows are owned by the login screen and what items should receive input events, the KDE developers need to move the Wayland lockscreen functionality to the kwin_wayland component.
"To provide screenlocker integration in kwin_wayland, KWin needs to link to kscreenlocker library," said Bhushan Shah. "Next, kwin_wayland was adjusted to start KSldApp (stands for KScreenlocker Daemon Application). As a result, we had beautiful lockscreen on Wayland session. However, this was not really secure... one can just Alt+Tab the screenlocker."
The screen locker on Wayland gets more secure
The next version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment will feature a more secure screen locker on the Wayland session, which will only allow greeter and lockscreen windows to be displayed when the screen is locked, will restrict input events to any client or window, will no longer pass events to KWin effects or clients, and will display only specific on-screen input methods.
All these and many more will land soon in the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.5 desktop environment, due for release on December 8, 2015. Until then, we will be able to test the Beta build in two days from the moment of writing this article, on November 19, 2015.