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Is using a keyring an insecure thing to do?
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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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The security model skews towards convenience versus absolute security, meaning automation is it's goal, not perfect security. They use a reasonable amount of security to protect unauthorized access, meaning untrusted apps can't access keys by default, and container apps only have selective access. AppArmor is supposed to be handling some DBUS interactions in the background to prevent any old app from grabbing everything, but again, automation is the purpose here.
If you don't have a reasonably trusted system, then sure, it's about as secure as any other password manager. I remember reading some time ago there was a plan to make a global framework for trusted application.accessnto things like this, but it was shot down for being "oppressive" in the same way as Microsoft's trust app mess.
Ideally there would be an advanced mode where each app is granted access to specific keys, and that interaction is controlled by the user. This would never be the default obviously as the user interaction would be an insane annoyance to people who don't care.
Thanks for the summary, a few more questions if its ok: What do you mean by untrusted apps? Is it untrusted by system (by what mechanism) or by some central entity? Container apps, you mean flatpaks? And they get selective access, like there is some space for all flatpaks that is separated, or there is actually one space per app and they don't see anything else?
This has more details: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeKeyring/SecurityFAQ
This seems to be out of date, and there is no info in the GNOME Project handbook.. Maybe its still valid?