Ctrl+Alt+Delete opened Plasma's session screen and a teacher hibernated a
classroom computer from it. A hibernated room cannot be recovered by
anybody standing in front of it, which on a Sunday morning is everybody.
logout=false was already set and did not stop it. That restriction
governs Plasma's own actions — what plasmashell draws in a menu or an
applet. The chord is a KGlobalAccel shortcut registered by ksmserver and
it asks D-Bus for the greeter without consulting a Plasma action at all.
A restriction on a menu cannot see a key.
Three layers, because each one alone has a way past it.
The key. kglobalshortcutsrc unbinds every ksmserver session action and
PowerDevil's Sleep, Hibernate, PowerDown and PowerOff, each entry marked
immutable. It is deliberately not in the xdg directory with the other
settings: kglobalacceld opens that file as a SimpleConfig, so it reads
one file in the teacher's home and no system directory at all. Measured —
with it in the cascade, kreadconfig6 reported the chord unbound while the
shortcut server went on answering Ctrl+Alt+Del. classroom-desktop-reset
copies the package's copy into place before the shortcut server starts,
the same way the panel is copied out of the package at every login.
The policy. A polkit rule refuses login1.suspend* and .hibernate* for the
classroom user and for nobody else. This is the layer that matters:
a key can be unbound and anything reaching logind can still ask.
Refusing here rather than masking sleep.target keeps a technician's own
account working, and is also what tells Plasma to stop drawing the
button — CanSuspend and CanHibernate come back no. Hybrid sleep and
suspend-then-hibernate have no action of their own in systemd 257; both
are authorised through hibernate, so denying it denies all three.
The greeter. Its D-Bus activation is shadowed with /bin/false, the same
mechanism already used for the old notification daemon. Layer one removes
the caller, this removes the callee.
Measured in the lab, from the package, after a reboot: the escape
reproduced first with the shadow removed — the greeter really does start
— and then refused, exited 1, with it back. The chord reports nothing
bound. systemctl suspend as the classroom user is denied. The maintenance
chord and the display chord both still answer, by key code, after the
shortcut file is replaced wholesale. A root process may still suspend,
hibernate, reboot and power off. 182 checks pass across a logout and back.
Screen locking stays disabled, the power button still does nothing, and
reboot and shut down are not newly denied to anybody.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
A real room upgraded to 0.1.45 and came up as stock Debian Plasma with
the old Waybar across the top, mako still catching notifications, and a
lock screen on an account that has no password.
The cause was one line, and it was in the lab: the harness handed the
session under test XDG_CONFIG_DIRS by hand, so every result it had ever
produced was a result about a machine somebody had already configured.
On a machine SDDM starts the session through PAM, PAM does not read
/etc/environment.d, and Debian's own plasma-workspace env.sh then set the
variable from scratch — so the classroom's settings directory was not in
the cascade at all. No layout, no lock policy, no Kiosk restrictions.
The settings now arrive the way Plasma delivers them, through a file in
/etc/xdg/plasma-workspace/env. Around that: the look and feel is
immutable on its own key so a stale profile cannot answer for it; the
palette is composed into the package, because naming a colour scheme does
not produce one and the dark bar had been coming from a technician's
hand; the desktop reset converges another desktop's appearance state and
keeps the room's own; and classroom-migrate stops, deactivates and masks
the old shell, including the D-Bus activation that brought mako back
while the panel was down — found only by killing the panel on a migrated
machine.
device.conf loses COMPOSITOR and comes off the hyprland channel, which
would otherwise have handed the room the experiment back.
The lab stops flattering the package: it restarts the machine, lets SDDM
actually autologin, and asks a fresh install and a machine upgraded from
the Hyprland package the same sixty questions. Both answer identically,
twice, and the panel still comes back from eight SIGKILLs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
