6 ms·

>> As well as just saying no to all the absurd requirements like being able to stream the protocol over the internet or track exact XY inputs absolute to the sc

>> As well as just saying no to all the absurd requirements like being able to stream the protocol over the internet or track exact XY inputs absolute to the screen outside of the apps own window. Which is a security hole along with being able to read keystrokes meant for any app, grabbing pixels that aren't yours, etc... the features people complained were missing from Wayland for the longest time were often security issues that X could never solve by design. But hey, fuck security I want to run Xeyes!

beanjuiceII 3y ago
Times my system was hacked via x or xeyes since I started using Linux in 95... zero
- charcircuit 3y ago
  It is not just about hacking your system. It's also about programs being able to hack into your accounts by keylogging you or stealing passwords from your clipboard. If you use cryptocurrencies malware can replace addresses on your clipboard with similar looking addresses while it's completely hidden in the background. Desktop Linux's security is usually like swiss cheese, so if you haven't been hacked it has more to do with you not encountering malware than your system protecting against it.
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    General purpose Linux distributions whether using Wayland or X don't meaningfully protect you from compromised software running on your system. Traditionally on all systems 99.9% of the game has always been and remains not installing malware or compromising your data or credentials. This means 99.9% of actual threats to your security remain the same. If you want actual isolation you need to run something like qubes which ironically actuality uses X
    - Gigachad 3y ago
      Wayland is simply one piece in the puzzle. Flatpak, PipeWire, etc are the fixing the other parts. Things are very slowly moving in the right direction though. Unfortunately most linux distros and users do not take security seriously unless it's in a server environment. Desktop linux is awfully far behind systems like MacOS.
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      >Traditionally on all systems 99.9% of the game has always been and remains not installing malware or compromising your data or credentials. This is a doomer mindset that ignores the advances the rest of the industry has been making. There is a big difference from malware having to find a 0day in order to cause harm to the user and malware developers being able to do exactly what they want without even a permission dialog box showing up.
      - michaelmrose 3y ago
        It's a practical mindset concerned with actual not hypothetical risks and actual not hypothetical costs and benefits.
    - Someone 3y ago
      > Traditionally on all systems 99.9% of the game has always been and remains not installing malware or compromising your data or credentials I won’t debate whether that’s true (it probably is, given that “not compromising your data or credentials” is close to a tautology “if you don’t let your stuff get stolen, it won’t get stolen”), but focus on > This means 99.9% of actual threats to your security remain the same. I don’t see how that follows because we’re not living in “traditionally” anymore. IMHO, if iOS and Android had run “traditional X Windows”, the number of successful over the air attacks would be way higher or nobody would use smartphones out of fear of getting hacked.
  - jowea 3y ago
    > It's also about programs being able to hack into your accounts by keylogging you or stealing passwords from your clipboard Honest question: why does this matter? If you end up with running malware as your user haven't you already "lost" in any of a wide variety of ways that Wayland does nothing against? Or is it that Wayland is trying to bring the mobile security model to the desktop with partially untrusted apps?
    - Bu9818 3y ago
      >Honest question: why does this matter? If you end up with running malware as your user haven't you already "lost" in any of a wide variety of ways that Wayland does nothing against? The security benefits of wayland are useful when you're also using other things like namespaces/seccomp (with bubblewrap/flatpak), and pipewire which I believe has a similar access control mechanism. >Or is it that Wayland is trying to bring the mobile security model to the desktop with partially untrusted apps? I trust my programs, but they can have bugs when parsing untrusted content. (ffmpeg, browsers). Although I've never been hacked, I'd like my systems to have defenses against this (without going full mobile security mode and giving up functionality and user freedom, or running everything in inconvenient isolated boxes with VMs). Also, I'm not sure if I'd trust proprietary games, so preventing them from doing naive things (I don't expect them to exploit kernel vulns) like snooping on files by using namespaces is nice.
    - pacifika 3y ago
      I think untrusted user input can exclude maliciously crafted urls and other ways where the user is not you.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      Building one wall doesn't keep you dry in a house when it rains. You need 4 walls and a roof. But the Linux ecosystem builds up to things bit by bit. So in this case, Wayland is progress towards a goal where untrusted apps can be run and are limited in what they can do by design. It doesn't matter at the moment, but one day it'll be an important brick in a secure system.
      - 3y ago
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Apparently you weren't on our university, being a victim on unwanted content when the teacher would be going to look at your screen.
- phkahler 3y ago
  >> Times my system was hacked via x or xeyes since I started using Linux in 95... zero Ummm right. The point wasn't that Xeyes is a security threat. It's that Xeyes is only possible because X is insecure by design, which is what allows the eyes to literally monitor what you're doing. Mouse, keystroke, screen grab. Hey go ahead and do your online banking with X. Just remember the real malware is headless, not literally displaying eyes to let you know it's watching.
capableweb 3y ago
Sure, but there are also legitimate uses for things like that, otherwise people wouldn't want them. How you build screen-recorders for example without "grabbing pixels that aren't yours"? Clearly, something is missing here. Why not a permission system like browsers do? A little popup that asks "X is requesting access to your full screen" rather than this "convenience VS security" black and white view most people seem to take a stance at?
- Gigachad 3y ago
  The answer is that these need to be special privileges controlled by the OS. Which is exactly how wayland manages it. Discord capturing the screen is a valid use case, but it should be approved by the DE and it should be possible to block this request. Currently the mainstream DEs just approve the request by default but in the future I can see a permissions dialog asking the user if they want to allow access to screen recording, and maybe a small icon in the top bar to show when recordings are happening.
  - Bu9818 3y ago
    Yup, or with your own scripts managing bwrap and security-context if not using a DE/Flatpak.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    That answer sucks so much that after nearly 15 years of Wayland evangelism KDE e.V. Directors are writing blog posts with "Wait, that sounds like it sucks" as a heading and talking about how the issues have been resolved to the point where it is just "ready enough for Plasma and KDE apps", with some reasonable paraphrasing. That is not a history to be proud of, for all that even Wayland is a big step up from X and we're all grateful for the efforts these people go to. This idea that screenshots require special OS-level privileges has been tested and, in practice, does not work. Literally nobody wants compositor-specific screenshot applications. It should have been addressed in the Wayland standards in the early drafts. Fair enough unrestricted access to any pixel is a security problem. But banning all access to pixels other programs control was an unworkable position that, in hindsight, didn't work. Telling people that the process that merges all the pixels together needs special OS-level support for reporting on what the merged output look like is just not sane. Something went wrong in the design process.

beanjuiceII 3y ago

Times my system was hacked via x or xeyes since I started using Linux in 95... zero

charcircuit 3y ago
It is not just about hacking your system. It's also about programs being able to hack into your accounts by keylogging you or stealing passwords from your clipboard. If you use cryptocurrencies malware can replace addresses on your clipboard with similar looking addresses while it's completely hidden in the background. Desktop Linux's security is usually like swiss cheese, so if you haven't been hacked it has more to do with you not encountering malware than your system protecting against it.
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  General purpose Linux distributions whether using Wayland or X don't meaningfully protect you from compromised software running on your system. Traditionally on all systems 99.9% of the game has always been and remains not installing malware or compromising your data or credentials. This means 99.9% of actual threats to your security remain the same. If you want actual isolation you need to run something like qubes which ironically actuality uses X
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    Wayland is simply one piece in the puzzle. Flatpak, PipeWire, etc are the fixing the other parts. Things are very slowly moving in the right direction though. Unfortunately most linux distros and users do not take security seriously unless it's in a server environment. Desktop linux is awfully far behind systems like MacOS.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    >Traditionally on all systems 99.9% of the game has always been and remains not installing malware or compromising your data or credentials. This is a doomer mindset that ignores the advances the rest of the industry has been making. There is a big difference from malware having to find a 0day in order to cause harm to the user and malware developers being able to do exactly what they want without even a permission dialog box showing up.
    - michaelmrose 3y ago
      It's a practical mindset concerned with actual not hypothetical risks and actual not hypothetical costs and benefits.
  - Someone 3y ago
    > Traditionally on all systems 99.9% of the game has always been and remains not installing malware or compromising your data or credentials I won’t debate whether that’s true (it probably is, given that “not compromising your data or credentials” is close to a tautology “if you don’t let your stuff get stolen, it won’t get stolen”), but focus on > This means 99.9% of actual threats to your security remain the same. I don’t see how that follows because we’re not living in “traditionally” anymore. IMHO, if iOS and Android had run “traditional X Windows”, the number of successful over the air attacks would be way higher or nobody would use smartphones out of fear of getting hacked.
- jowea 3y ago
  > It's also about programs being able to hack into your accounts by keylogging you or stealing passwords from your clipboard Honest question: why does this matter? If you end up with running malware as your user haven't you already "lost" in any of a wide variety of ways that Wayland does nothing against? Or is it that Wayland is trying to bring the mobile security model to the desktop with partially untrusted apps?
  - Bu9818 3y ago
    >Honest question: why does this matter? If you end up with running malware as your user haven't you already "lost" in any of a wide variety of ways that Wayland does nothing against? The security benefits of wayland are useful when you're also using other things like namespaces/seccomp (with bubblewrap/flatpak), and pipewire which I believe has a similar access control mechanism. >Or is it that Wayland is trying to bring the mobile security model to the desktop with partially untrusted apps? I trust my programs, but they can have bugs when parsing untrusted content. (ffmpeg, browsers). Although I've never been hacked, I'd like my systems to have defenses against this (without going full mobile security mode and giving up functionality and user freedom, or running everything in inconvenient isolated boxes with VMs). Also, I'm not sure if I'd trust proprietary games, so preventing them from doing naive things (I don't expect them to exploit kernel vulns) like snooping on files by using namespaces is nice.
  - pacifika 3y ago
    I think untrusted user input can exclude maliciously crafted urls and other ways where the user is not you.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    Building one wall doesn't keep you dry in a house when it rains. You need 4 walls and a roof. But the Linux ecosystem builds up to things bit by bit. So in this case, Wayland is progress towards a goal where untrusted apps can be run and are limited in what they can do by design. It doesn't matter at the moment, but one day it'll be an important brick in a secure system.
    - 3y ago
pjmlp 3y ago
Apparently you weren't on our university, being a victim on unwanted content when the teacher would be going to look at your screen.
phkahler 3y ago
>> Times my system was hacked via x or xeyes since I started using Linux in 95... zero Ummm right. The point wasn't that Xeyes is a security threat. It's that Xeyes is only possible because X is insecure by design, which is what allows the eyes to literally monitor what you're doing. Mouse, keystroke, screen grab. Hey go ahead and do your online banking with X. Just remember the real malware is headless, not literally displaying eyes to let you know it's watching.

capableweb 3y ago

Sure, but there are also legitimate uses for things like that, otherwise people wouldn't want them. How you build screen-recorders for example without "grabbing pixels that aren't yours"? Clearly, something is missing here. Why not a permission system like browsers do? A little popup that asks "X is requesting access to your full screen" rather than this "convenience VS security" black and white view most people seem to take a stance at?

Gigachad 3y ago
The answer is that these need to be special privileges controlled by the OS. Which is exactly how wayland manages it. Discord capturing the screen is a valid use case, but it should be approved by the DE and it should be possible to block this request. Currently the mainstream DEs just approve the request by default but in the future I can see a permissions dialog asking the user if they want to allow access to screen recording, and maybe a small icon in the top bar to show when recordings are happening.
- Bu9818 3y ago
  Yup, or with your own scripts managing bwrap and security-context if not using a DE/Flatpak.
- roenxi 3y ago
  That answer sucks so much that after nearly 15 years of Wayland evangelism KDE e.V. Directors are writing blog posts with "Wait, that sounds like it sucks" as a heading and talking about how the issues have been resolved to the point where it is just "ready enough for Plasma and KDE apps", with some reasonable paraphrasing. That is not a history to be proud of, for all that even Wayland is a big step up from X and we're all grateful for the efforts these people go to. This idea that screenshots require special OS-level privileges has been tested and, in practice, does not work. Literally nobody wants compositor-specific screenshot applications. It should have been addressed in the Wayland standards in the early drafts. Fair enough unrestricted access to any pixel is a security problem. But banning all access to pixels other programs control was an unworkable position that, in hindsight, didn't work. Telling people that the process that merges all the pixels together needs special OS-level support for reporting on what the merged output look like is just not sane. Something went wrong in the design process.