toidinamaiblog

I just released vlock 1.4, the linux virtual console locker. There were no changes between vlock-1.4 and vlock-1.4-rc2. I took over maintenance over vlock about two weeks ago. I tried to find the original author, Michael K. Johnson, to send him some patches. Instead he suggested that I continue maintaining it myself because he hadn't looked at vlock for a long time himself and was quite suprised that people are still using it. I personally find it the best and most secure locking tools for single user machines because it really locks a machine even when I am logged in some virtual consoles and forgot to log myself out.

The changes from vlock 1.3 include merely my original patch, making it possible to disable the linux sysrq mechanism while all consoles are locked, and some cleanups mostly license clarifications (GPLv2) and fixing some compile time warnings.

The next version will probably no longer contain support for shadow passwords and only rely on PAM for authentification. I'll also probably add two new features:

• Making it possible to let vlock automatically switch to a new console when locking all consoles and switching back on unlock, probably with support to make this securely possible from X.
• Making it possible to run an additional command after the display is securely locked. This would make it possible to really make sure the a laptop is secured before going into standby. As vlock is normally installed as a setuid-root program there are some security issues I have to work out first so this will probably not be in the next version.

If you have suggestions, bug reports or patches, or if you use vlock on *BSD please drop me a line at frank-vlock@benkstein.net.