ESesdf·Mar 20, 2025
And more!
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=758032
https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-screensaver/issues/354
In CVE-2024-54471: Leaking Passwords (and More!) on macOSlinuxmint
cinnamon-screensaver
Python2021–2025
linuxmint / cinnamon-screensaver
cinnamon-screensaver
The Cinnamon screen locker and screensaver program
13Distinct people
13Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
160GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
The Cinnamon screen locker and screensaver program
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year13 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-01-16 07:27:47 UTC to 2025-03-20 19:08:50 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 2 | 6 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
13 sourcesThe problem with this assumption, that all possible attacks have been narrowed down to expensive only attacks i.e nation station level. These are complex systems and its not possible to prove that the only form of attacks are within these overton Windows. There may be much simpler forms of attack that aren't expensive, but the experts aren't aware of them, and therefore not focusing on. This is one of the big reasons for provably secure systems like Sel4 and other functional programming paradigms. We can't prove that all the problems are in this expensive box we put ourselves in, and all it takes is a 12 year old to discover one of these cheap attacks with a tooth pick or kids toy undermine very expensive defence systems.
Take for example, John Draper who discovered in the 60's that a Captain Crunch whistle toy could be used to make free
Read the rest
phone calls on the telephone systems. Or the discovery of Side Channel attacks by an engineer at Bell Telephone company who noticed that a Bell Telephone model 131-B2 would produce distinct spikes for each key pressed on the oscilloscope across the room. Therefore not requiring nation station level expense to break the encryption used by Navy and Army's encryption systems. Or during the Afghan war, the US was deploying armored vehicles that they assumed would provide good protection, and would be expensive to attack by the enemy. Turned out they could make IEDs from inverted copper cheaply and within locals kitchens. That proved very successful. Or the kid who discovered he could bypass the mint screensaver by smashing random keys on the keyboard (https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-screensaver/issues/354). The list of these types of cheap attacks are throughout history.
I misremembered some detail, it was this one about the cinnamon desktop and its cinnamon-screensaver:
https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-screensaver/issues/354
Regarding the "screensaver as lock screen", there is also this interesting writeup by jwz:
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/01/i-told-you-so-2021-edition/
(open in new tab ^^)
But yeah, it wasn't the Gnome login screen.
While searching I also found some issues with cat in the Ubuntu bug tracker:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity-greeter/+bug...
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1463112
In Simultaneous cat and external keyboard input causing kernel panic (2011)Screensaver lock by-pass via the virtual keyboard (2020)
1 points · Open discussionWhat bug are you referring to? After searching I can only find references to bugs in cinnamon-screensaver and xorg-x11-server that have all been fixed.
- https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-mint-fixes-screensaver-b...
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2020-25712
- https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-screensaver/issues/354
Is there another bug that is long-standing and have not yet been fixed?
In Linux Mint Debian Edition 5 is here> if there’s any way to crash xscreensaver, that is a potential security issue...
This has happened before: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-screensaver/issues/354
In Wayland: “Move fast and break things” as a moral imperativeYou'd be better off reading the response here:
https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-screensaver/issues/354...
In Kids find a security flaw in Linux Mint by mashing keys"written from scratch", though it does contain xscreensaver code written by jwz ... and with a copyright changed from BSD to GPL - https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-screensaver/blob/maste... .
The commit is at https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-screensaver/commit/38a... where mtwebster writes:
> We'll use the old screensaver auth code instead - this ports gs-auth-pam.c and gs-auth.h from the old screensaver,
In Kids find a security flaw in Linux Mint by mashing keys> I'm not sure why GNOME screensaver cannot do something like this. Lock screen crashing seems like something inevitable (especially considering buggy graphic card drivers and so on), and it makes sense to prepare for it so that crashes won't bypass the screen locker.
That is an option Linux Mint is considering[0] among other options.
[0]: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-screensaver/issues/354...
In Kids find a security flaw in Linux Mint by mashing keysFor everyone linking the JWZ "I Told You So" post, the devs are aware of it and posted a response in the GitHub issue. I encourage everyone to read their side of the issue: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-screensaver/issues/354...
In Kids find a security flaw in Linux Mint by mashing keysReplies from Linux Mint contributors to this point make for fairly interesting reading: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-screensaver/issues/354...
> I would gladly meet the liar for a cage fight, winner takes all.
In Jwz: I told you so, 2021 editionKids find a security flaw in Linux Mint by mashing keys
778 points · Open discussionScreensaver lock by-pass via the virtual keyboard
2 points · Open discussion