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From time to time, an authentication dialog appears on my laptop running Linux Mint asking me to authorize some action. I've seen several different actions so far. This has been happening for many years and only occasionally. I have no reason to believe that these actions are not legitimate but I never authorize them out of principle.

You should not put your password in every dialog that appears out of nowhere, right?

Recently, it became more frequent after I added another user account. When switching between accounts I often encountered a request to authorize software update. The culprit is this flatpak action:

  <action id="org.freedesktop.Flatpak.appstream-update">
    ...
    <defaults>
      <allow_any>auth_admin</allow_any>
      <allow_inactive>auth_admin</allow_inactive>
      <allow_active>yes</allow_active>
    </defaults>
  </action>

An inactive user needs an admin password to perform the action. Why is the action not simply allowed or disallowed for inactive user?

This is a common trend in many polkit actions. Does this mean that it is an accepted behavior that when some background action needs authentication it can just pop up a dialog for the active user? Or am I missing something?

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    "You should not put your password in every dialog that appears out of nowhere, right?" agreed. Commented 9 hours ago

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An inactive user needs an admin password to perform the action. Why is the action not simply allowed or disallowed for inactive user?

If it were simply allowed, then it would become easy to bypass the admin approval requirement by making your session inactive.

If it were simply disallowed, then it would become impossible to invoke from session types where the 'active' distinction is not applicable, such as SSH.

For console sessions, the foreground console is the active session. So when you switch between users, the foreground user "owns" the console and deliberately has more privileges, e.g. /dev access is also granted/revoked in the same way.

Does this mean that it is an accepted behavior that when some background action needs authentication it can just pop up a dialog for the active user? Or am I missing something?

More likely it means the developers haven't tested it in any other situation except a computer with a single user having a local, active, console session.

Whichever program is invoking Flatpak in background (possibly gnome-software) might not have considered that there are two instances of it by different users, or that one of them is in a background session.

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