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But X11 was there before and installing random packages on your Desktop (or piping stuff from curl to a root bash, etc) is not secure. That is not controversial

But X11 was there before and installing random packages on your Desktop (or piping stuff from curl to a root bash, etc) is not secure. That is not controversial, I'd think. The point that canonical is trying to push that installing random packages is more secure with snap/snappy because they are sandboxed (to some extend). However, as Matthew Garrett points out, this sandboxing is practically useless as long as you are running on X11, since a sandboxed program can send keystrokes to other applications, grab keystrokes, do window grabs, etc. So it still has as much control as unsandboxed applications as long as they are running in a normal X11 session. He is right to call them out on this. There might be a slight conflict of interest here. Since he is actually stating (known) facts about X11's security model, I don't see the problem.

rdtsc 11y ago
> is more secure with snap/snappy because they are sandboxed (to some extend). In a press release. Yes it is more secure but when running on a desktop with X11 will have same issues as before with X11. Imagine a press release for 16.04 that all of the sudden starts going into details about X11 vulnerabilities. Who does that? I am can see refuting a white-paper where Ubuntu makes detailed claims about security guarantees under certain threat models but this seems like a cheap shot to me. Moreover under this model you can shoot down any product. "Tor provides privacy" -- "Ah no it doesn't, here are more details". "The new JDK is faster than the old" -- "Wrong! Here is a benchmark where it shows it is slower". And so on.