4 ms·

Libwsm: Wayland Security Module library for Wayland compositors

24 points by harporoeder 5y ago

rektide 5y ago
I have little idea how this works in practice, but absolutely super in love with the idea of having security policy for describing different capabilities upon a desktop. Wayland made things secure, and this is trying to figure out how we make them share-able.
nextaccountic 5y ago
Last commit, 2016. Last issue, 2018. Open issues in 2014 "verify compatibility with {KDE,Gnome,etc}" and no comments. :( It's so so so frustrating the current state of Wayland fragmentation. X11 wasn't secure, but at least it worked.
- buu700 5y ago
  Agreed. I wonder if there just isn't enough funding and developer interest to follow through on the ambitious goals of Wayland in a more reasonable time frame because of the maturity and increasing Unixyness of macOS and Windows. Personally, I can't wait for the transition to finally end and for the Wayland ecosystem to achieve similar levels of maturity to X11. I've been donating to marcan's Patreon since the M1 was announced, and now that I own an M1 I intend to switch (back) to Linux when and if it becomes clear that everything will work smoothly (in terms of both hardware support and desktop Linux/Wayland in general).
  - samus 5y ago
    The issue with Wayland + Security is that nobody can really focus on it yet. Wayland works for like 90% of use cases, but X already works for something beyond 99.9% (rough numbers, I know). Until Wayland has caught up on the reliability front, new security features are probably on the backburner.
- na85 5y ago
  Wayland is a great example of why Linux is always an also-ran in the desktop space. X is cool and has the cachet of being such a venerable piece of software, but it needs replaced. If you actually talk to people who hack on X you'll find (for example) that it's been client-server in name only for quite some time, is full of kludges, etc. Wayland has been around for what, 12 years now? It's still a disaster. When will the Linux community admit that Wayland has failed and move on to something simpler/less ambitious?
  - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    > Wayland has been around for what, 12 years now? It's still a disaster. Define disaster. Because it's been working fine on my machine under Gnome 3 for years now and now that we have PipeWire that includes everything we could do before working in a nicer way. I don't know why people comment under post about abandoned very technical library like if they were in any way significant. Wayland just works. Just install Fedora or Ubuntu. It ships by default.
    - neolog 5y ago
      Can you share screen on video chat?
      - sterwill 5y ago
        I'm using Ubuntu 21.04 with Wayland and, yes, screen sharing works in Google Meet, Slack, and Zoom. I haven't tried Teams in a while, so I don't know about that.
      - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
        Yes, no issue whatsoever with the Teams webapp using Chrome.
    - chrismorgan 5y ago
      After a few years on Windows I recently returned to Arch Linux which I previously used with the i3 tiling window manager, and am now using Sway (a Wayland port of i3). It generally works well, but there are many applications that I have to fiddle with to get to work properly. Firefox is still X by default, meaning to me most significantly no high-DPI support or precise scrolling. You can force it to use Wayland via the MOZ_WAYLAND_ENABLE environment variable, but it still has definite issues, like popup windows not being marked as popups, with effects like notifications being added to the non-floating windows and taking focus, rather than floating in the corner of the screen undecorated. (I use Nightly and am test-driving the process-per-site thing and it’s currently got other issues that are probably Wayland-specific, but that’s what you get for using prerelease stuff.) Audacity has utterly crippling issues when run Wayland-native (its default). So I have a wrapper script that first clears the WAYLAND_DISPLAY environment variable so it will use XWayland, where it has fewer issues (it’s still pretty bad in places, e.g. all popup windows are start out at the minimum possible size and have to be resized before you can interact by anything other than keyboard, but I’m running high-DPI XWayland patches and I suspect this is at least partly due to bugs in that). Krita I need to set QT_SCALE_FACTOR to match my XWayland scaling (a high-DPI thing). Note that I can’t set this globally, or else Qt apps that can run under Wayland (e.g. Zeal) will be huge. cq-editor (CadQuery) crashes in Wayland and must be run with `--platform xcb` or with WAYLAND_DISPLAY unset. (Upstream’s distribution is built against a Qt that is not Wayland-enabled, so the problem actually doesn’t arise there, but if you build your own it’ll probably be Wayland-enabled.) Zoom has taken to crashing on joining meetings under Wayland, and only implements some GNOME-specific screen sharing rather than xdg-desktop-portal screen sharing which is, I believe, what everyone else settled on—showing the internal fragmentation problem of Wayland. So because of the crashes, I run Zoom under XWayland, not even losing screen sharing because it was already broken. (Firefox and Chromium do screen sharing without any trouble, but only of whole outputs, not individual windows.) But on the other hand, a few days ago I started i3 so I could do screen sharing on Zoom (of a second display, HDMI-A-1, 1920×1080@60Hz; main display eDP-1 being 2560×1440@165Hz), and ugh, the tearing! Full screen updates in Alacritty pretty consistently do the top half in one frame and then the bottom half in the next frame, and the block cursor moving while typing is super glitchy. I had forgotten how bad this stuff was because Wayland does it perfectly.
- UberIsAnnoying 5y ago
  https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues?state=all https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i... https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests?state=all https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...
- Jasper_ 5y ago
  I was against this approach at the time and made my concerns known. I don't think narrow module-like security is a good implementation idea, and as far as I know, none of the other desktops disagreed with me. https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2014-February/013506.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2014-Fe...

24 points by harporoeder 5y ago

I have little idea how this works in practice, but absolutely super in love with the idea of having security policy for describing different capabilities upon a desktop. Wayland made things secure, and this is trying to figure out how we make them share-able.

nextaccountic 5y ago

Last commit, 2016. Last issue, 2018. Open issues in 2014 "verify compatibility with {KDE,Gnome,etc}" and no comments. :( It's so so so frustrating the current state of Wayland fragmentation. X11 wasn't secure, but at least it worked.

buu700 5y ago
Agreed. I wonder if there just isn't enough funding and developer interest to follow through on the ambitious goals of Wayland in a more reasonable time frame because of the maturity and increasing Unixyness of macOS and Windows. Personally, I can't wait for the transition to finally end and for the Wayland ecosystem to achieve similar levels of maturity to X11. I've been donating to marcan's Patreon since the M1 was announced, and now that I own an M1 I intend to switch (back) to Linux when and if it becomes clear that everything will work smoothly (in terms of both hardware support and desktop Linux/Wayland in general).
- samus 5y ago
  The issue with Wayland + Security is that nobody can really focus on it yet. Wayland works for like 90% of use cases, but X already works for something beyond 99.9% (rough numbers, I know). Until Wayland has caught up on the reliability front, new security features are probably on the backburner.
na85 5y ago
Wayland is a great example of why Linux is always an also-ran in the desktop space. X is cool and has the cachet of being such a venerable piece of software, but it needs replaced. If you actually talk to people who hack on X you'll find (for example) that it's been client-server in name only for quite some time, is full of kludges, etc. Wayland has been around for what, 12 years now? It's still a disaster. When will the Linux community admit that Wayland has failed and move on to something simpler/less ambitious?
- WastingMyTime89 5y ago
  > Wayland has been around for what, 12 years now? It's still a disaster. Define disaster. Because it's been working fine on my machine under Gnome 3 for years now and now that we have PipeWire that includes everything we could do before working in a nicer way. I don't know why people comment under post about abandoned very technical library like if they were in any way significant. Wayland just works. Just install Fedora or Ubuntu. It ships by default.
  - neolog 5y ago
    Can you share screen on video chat?
    - sterwill 5y ago
      I'm using Ubuntu 21.04 with Wayland and, yes, screen sharing works in Google Meet, Slack, and Zoom. I haven't tried Teams in a while, so I don't know about that.
    - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
      Yes, no issue whatsoever with the Teams webapp using Chrome.
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    After a few years on Windows I recently returned to Arch Linux which I previously used with the i3 tiling window manager, and am now using Sway (a Wayland port of i3). It generally works well, but there are many applications that I have to fiddle with to get to work properly. Firefox is still X by default, meaning to me most significantly no high-DPI support or precise scrolling. You can force it to use Wayland via the MOZ_WAYLAND_ENABLE environment variable, but it still has definite issues, like popup windows not being marked as popups, with effects like notifications being added to the non-floating windows and taking focus, rather than floating in the corner of the screen undecorated. (I use Nightly and am test-driving the process-per-site thing and it’s currently got other issues that are probably Wayland-specific, but that’s what you get for using prerelease stuff.) Audacity has utterly crippling issues when run Wayland-native (its default). So I have a wrapper script that first clears the WAYLAND_DISPLAY environment variable so it will use XWayland, where it has fewer issues (it’s still pretty bad in places, e.g. all popup windows are start out at the minimum possible size and have to be resized before you can interact by anything other than keyboard, but I’m running high-DPI XWayland patches and I suspect this is at least partly due to bugs in that). Krita I need to set QT_SCALE_FACTOR to match my XWayland scaling (a high-DPI thing). Note that I can’t set this globally, or else Qt apps that can run under Wayland (e.g. Zeal) will be huge. cq-editor (CadQuery) crashes in Wayland and must be run with `--platform xcb` or with WAYLAND_DISPLAY unset. (Upstream’s distribution is built against a Qt that is not Wayland-enabled, so the problem actually doesn’t arise there, but if you build your own it’ll probably be Wayland-enabled.) Zoom has taken to crashing on joining meetings under Wayland, and only implements some GNOME-specific screen sharing rather than xdg-desktop-portal screen sharing which is, I believe, what everyone else settled on—showing the internal fragmentation problem of Wayland. So because of the crashes, I run Zoom under XWayland, not even losing screen sharing because it was already broken. (Firefox and Chromium do screen sharing without any trouble, but only of whole outputs, not individual windows.) But on the other hand, a few days ago I started i3 so I could do screen sharing on Zoom (of a second display, HDMI-A-1, 1920×1080@60Hz; main display eDP-1 being 2560×1440@165Hz), and ugh, the tearing! Full screen updates in Alacritty pretty consistently do the top half in one frame and then the bottom half in the next frame, and the block cursor moving while typing is super glitchy. I had forgotten how bad this stuff was because Wayland does it perfectly.
UberIsAnnoying 5y ago
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues?state=all https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i... https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests?state=all https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...
Jasper_ 5y ago
I was against this approach at the time and made my concerns known. I don't think narrow module-like security is a good implementation idea, and as far as I know, none of the other desktops disagreed with me. https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2014-February/013506.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2014-Fe...