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LtWorf 2 days ago

So you just don't like X11. Ok. But what was your point then other than share your personal feelings?

kragen a day ago | parent [-]

It sounds like you're out of your depth in this conversation, Lieutenant. I have ambivalent feelings about X11, but they aren't relevant to the topic at hand.

0xbadcafebee said, "Why do people keep persisting this myth? X11 has authentication. ... What's insane about all these discussions is that NOBODY IS HACKING X SERVERS. There's a thousand other kinds of software on Linux that there is real malware for. But nobody is trying to hijack your X11 session. This imagined threat is a red herring ..." and then nurettin followed up by saying, "x11 has been around for decades, and these things just don't happen. And the reason is that there are much simpler and more effective ways to pwn a box than trying to screenshot an x session or trying to hook for key presses."

But in fact I have seen people gaining elevated privileges by "hijacking" X servers when the authentication was configured to be lax, and I've sometimes configured my own authentication to be lax (because configuring it properly was a hassle), so I know it's not an "imagined threat" from "NOBODY" or a "myth" or things that "just don't happen" because "nobody is trying" them.

But it's not a "bug" either. It's a design tradeoff. X just wasn't designed to provide a security boundary between applications, to encrypt its network traffic, or by default to use any authentication at all other than host-based authentication. Even MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 auth was an add-on, and it is sent in the clear, permitting replay attacks. These are defensible tradeoffs, and ssh -X and the current xauth defaults improve the situation significantly, but Wayland's design provides a lot more isolation between applications by default, which is probably a more defensible tradeoff.