I am not sure I quite got your question, and had a very succinct look at the video, but passwd is being used here as a way to check whether the user has root ac

I am not sure I quite got your question, and had a very succinct look at the video, but passwd is being used here as a way to check whether the user has root access. It is important to note that this exploit is an old one, has been known for a while, and is one of the things being addressed by switching to Wayland. That said, a lot of work has been done towards running X11 rootless (Arch for instance [1]). That should be possible as long as you use DRI, as far as I know (which is the case if you use a graphics card less than about ~10-20 years old, depending on the brand). [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#General https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#General