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"But Xorg doesn't have to run as root" All the hand wringing over root privilege escalation on Linux is almost irrelevant for most single-user systems, as sinc
by pmoriarty 6y ago
"But Xorg doesn't have to run as root"
All the hand wringing over root privilege escalation on Linux is almost irrelevant for most single-user systems, as since there's really only one non-root account which usually has all the data the user cares about, getting access to just that non-root account would be disaster enough for the user.[1]
So if Wayland's design is standing in the way of doing useful things because they're concerned about root privilege escalation, they've got their priorities mixed up.
[1] - not to mention that once a non-root account is exploited then getting root in some other way, even if Wayland itself can't be exploited, is usually not difficult.
- kuschku 6y agoThe goal isn’t to prevent escalation to root, but to prevent escalation out of a sandbox. If you sandbox an application today, while it can’t access the filesystem at all, and nothing under your user account, as long as it can show you a window under X11, it can log, manipulate, and inject any input events or window contents of any other windows as well. That’s the one single big hole in todays sandboxes under linux, and there’s only two options to solve it: put a whole separate X server into the sandbox of every single application with X-on-X, or replace X. Which is one of the things wayland fixes.