Parental Controls Improvements

[davidmhewitt]

Project Description

elementary OS has had Parental Controls functionality for some time. It covers features such as:

• Only allowing specified user accounts to log into the system between certain times
• Preventing specified user accounts from accessing certain sites
• Preventing specified user accounts from using certain applications

These features are currently implemented from scratch and can be quite buggy. GNOME and Flatpak have settled on using a library called malcontent for their parental controls support. The goal of this GSoC project would be to replace as much of the existing Parental Controls system with code that relies on malcontent as far as possible.

Then, if time allows, it would be good to take stock of the remaining elementary Parental Controls functionality that malcontent doesn't support, and see what would be involved in implementing that. This may be as little as opening feature requests on the upstream bugtracker to gauge interest. It then may go as far as implementing or starting to implement some of these features upstream.

Expected Outcomes

• Our parental controls settings application would be modified to use malcontent to store rulesets about which applications are blocked from using. Currently this communicates with a custom written daemon which stores its config in a config file. This PR implements this for Flatpak applications only, but we would expect this to be expanded out to all applications.
• Add malcontent support to our applications menu and dock to prevent restricted users from launching restricted applications via the GUI.
• Investigate the session time limits functionality within malcontent and see if it supports our desired (currently manually implemented) use case. If so, re-writing the relevant parts of the stack to use that instead of the current custom written code.
• Rewrite parts of the current parental controls daemon to use malcontent as the "source of truth" for parental controls settings. For example, the list of blocked applications is currently stored as a config file written as the daemon. These settings should be read from malcontent instead.

Stretch goals

• Testing alternative ways that restricted applications could be launched by a restricted user (e.g. via the terminal or a TTY prompt) and considering ways this could be blocked or restricted.
• Potentially working with malcontent upstream on feature requests and/or implementation of additional features to try and support the full elementary parental controls functionality within the library.

Requirements

A student tackling this will need to be comfortable developing on Linux with a comprehensive developer guide, or willing to learn quickly. They will also need to be able to learn how to modify an existing Vala codebase with help from our community of developers, and to work with upstream projects in the open source desktop ecosystem given the proper introductions and resources.

[danirabbit]

@davidmhewitt would you be available to help mentor this project?

[davidmhewitt]

Unfortunately, I don't think I'd have the time to commit to being a mentor. I'm very much happy to be a point of contact for any technical questions regarding this, or any of the other projects. But I don't think I'd be able to commit enough time for it to be a valuable experience for the student.

[danirabbit]

No problem. I would be willing to mentor then as long as I can pick your brain if we get stuck ;)

[cassidyjames]

I would be available and happy to mentor this project! I attended the GNOME Parental Controls & Metered Data hackfest, helped design our current implementation, and have existing relationships with upstream parties.