Bug 165152 – gnome-volume-manager does not autorun

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED NEEDINFO

[Description chad heuschober 2007-02-03 17:17:13 UTC]

The default behaviour for gnome-volume-manager is to not autorun mounted discs / drives and to mount them all with the noexec option.

While this is a smart security choice the configuration dialog for removable drives and media explicitly provides a tickbox for enabling autorun on certain types of media.

This, however, is misleading as autorun is still not enabled because of the noexec flag.

I propose that either (1) this tickbox be disabled (greyed) and noexec be transparently enforced or (2) g-v-m be altered so that, if the user has checked to allow autorun on the specified removable medium, drives are mounted with noexec, checked for executable scripts (def. g-v-m behaviour) and if found and selected by user remounted with execute permissions in-tact.

g-v-m's default behaviour with the autorun tickbox checked is to ask the user at mount upon discovery of executable files following a predetermined naming pattern (all available in gnome-conf) whether or not he/she wishes to enable autorun for this instance. Because of this it seems reasonable to go with the second option since there are ample opportunities for the user to avoid the running of malicious scripts on his/her system and at some point the user must be the one to hold the security responsibility so as to avoid the sacrifice of features to others.

~chad

Reproducible: Couldn't Reproduce

Steps to Reproduce:
1.check autorun tickbox in config for removable drives and media
2.insert drive, scripts found, user asked if he/she wishes to autorun scripts
3.user hits the 'yes' button

Actual Results:  
Drive is mounted but autorun is not executed because the noexec mount option is specified at mount.

Expected Results:  
Drive should unmount / remount at that point with execute permissions in-tact.

[Comment 1 Jakub Moc (RETIRED) 2007-02-03 19:13:34 UTC]

This is a wrong place for feature requests... You need to go to http://bugzilla.gnome.org/ ;)

[Comment 2 chad heuschober 2007-02-03 19:58:54 UTC]

(In reply to comment #1)
> This is a wrong place for feature requests... You need to go to
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/ ;)
> 

Thanks.

Initially I thought so too but I /believe/ the structure for it already exists in the g-v-m code. Several distros already change the mount behaviour in one of the two suggested ways.

It used to be pmount before the 2.15 versions and pmount's behaviour could be altered to pmount -e. Now I understand it's an internal script that runs the mounting but it still might be something worth patching.

If you still think I should submit this upstream to gnome I'll gladly do so. I just figured I'd start here since I know of a couple distros that patch it this way themselves.

regards,
~chad

[Comment 3 Daniel Gryniewicz (RETIRED) 2007-02-06 02:15:10 UTC]

If you could point to patches from other distros, I'll look into it.

[Comment 4 Gilles Dartiguelongue (RETIRED) 2007-11-17 21:08:18 UTC]

As far as I can see, there is no such patch in http://patches.ubuntu.com/by-release/extracted/debian/g/gnome-volume-manager/ nor in debian. I'm not 100% sure but last time I put an autorunnable cdrom into my cdrom drive, it just worked.

[Comment 5 Gilles Dartiguelongue (RETIRED) 2007-12-13 23:43:20 UTC]

please chime in when you have more info