4 ms·

Wow, i have a lot to learn.... Do you know if these sort of things are still possible on wayland ? What about a Flatpak app on Wayland, does that help ? Because

Wow, i have a lot to learn.... Do you know if these sort of things are still possible on wayland ? What about a Flatpak app on Wayland, does that help ? Because I think I've read somewhere that Flatpak apps on X11 was this way, implying that with Wayland it wasn't. I wish i had more time to dive into this sort of stuff... Flatpak does aggressively isolate apps from the OS though: http://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/working-with-the-sandbox.html http://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/working-with-the-sandbox.h...

Jasper_ 9y ago
Wayland indeed closes a lot of these huge holes. It's one of the core reasons for its introduction. Flatpak has no X11 sandbox. Others, like Firejail, have attempted to create X11 sandboxes, but they've had holes (last I tested they had the X RECORD extension enabled, which has no use except being a keylogger), or broke valid applications / accessibility tools.
- wander_homer 9y ago
  No, Wayland doesn't close any of those huge holes. That's like saying: We removed all the windows to your house, you should now be safe from people spying on you or stealing your stuff. Wayland doesn't grant Wayland clients permission to those resources, but without further sandboxing and using technologies like Linux namespaces, AppArmor, SELinux, ... that's completely useless in itself. Wayland only makes it harder/impossible for trustworthy applications to do their job, while malicious applications just take one of the many other routes to get what they want.
  - m45t3r 9y ago
    > Wayland doesn't grant Wayland clients permission to those resources, but without further sandboxing and using technologies like Linux namespaces, AppArmor, SELinux, ... that's completely useless in itself. Wayland only makes it harder/impossible for trustworthy applications to do their job, while malicious applications just take one of the many other routes to get what they want. What you described is exactly the paper of Flatpak, I think it even used SELinux for it. AFAIK, Flatpak with Wayland is a good way to sandbox apps on Linux.
    - wander_homer 9y ago
      A good way to sandbox applications is where you get a secure system without much effort but you still can grant applications certain privileges, because as a matter of fact some applications just need access to sensitive data to do their work. With Wayland that's basically impossible, since there's no standardized way to grant your hotkey manager access to the global input, or your color picker permission to read the color of an arbitrary pixel on the screen, ... It's security by not doing anything. With X11 on the other hand I can sandbox X11 clients I don't trust, thereby limiting them in what they can do, but other clients I do trust have the ability to do all sorts of great things so I can do my work efficiently. While not perfect, not even close, it's certainly better than not being allowed to do anything.

Jasper_ 9y ago

Wayland indeed closes a lot of these huge holes. It's one of the core reasons for its introduction. Flatpak has no X11 sandbox. Others, like Firejail, have attempted to create X11 sandboxes, but they've had holes (last I tested they had the X RECORD extension enabled, which has no use except being a keylogger), or broke valid applications / accessibility tools.

wander_homer 9y ago
No, Wayland doesn't close any of those huge holes. That's like saying: We removed all the windows to your house, you should now be safe from people spying on you or stealing your stuff. Wayland doesn't grant Wayland clients permission to those resources, but without further sandboxing and using technologies like Linux namespaces, AppArmor, SELinux, ... that's completely useless in itself. Wayland only makes it harder/impossible for trustworthy applications to do their job, while malicious applications just take one of the many other routes to get what they want.
- m45t3r 9y ago
  > Wayland doesn't grant Wayland clients permission to those resources, but without further sandboxing and using technologies like Linux namespaces, AppArmor, SELinux, ... that's completely useless in itself. Wayland only makes it harder/impossible for trustworthy applications to do their job, while malicious applications just take one of the many other routes to get what they want. What you described is exactly the paper of Flatpak, I think it even used SELinux for it. AFAIK, Flatpak with Wayland is a good way to sandbox apps on Linux.
  - wander_homer 9y ago
    A good way to sandbox applications is where you get a secure system without much effort but you still can grant applications certain privileges, because as a matter of fact some applications just need access to sensitive data to do their work. With Wayland that's basically impossible, since there's no standardized way to grant your hotkey manager access to the global input, or your color picker permission to read the color of an arbitrary pixel on the screen, ... It's security by not doing anything. With X11 on the other hand I can sandbox X11 clients I don't trust, thereby limiting them in what they can do, but other clients I do trust have the ability to do all sorts of great things so I can do my work efficiently. While not perfect, not even close, it's certainly better than not being allowed to do anything.