mid-kid
11 hours ago
For an article written late last year I hoped for a little more awareness of how massive a security hole granting full, unfiltered access to the X11 server is. Granted, any sandboxing is better than none, but firefox is one of the few apps that already sandboxes itself really well, and with a blog title like that it might be good to touch upon things like nested X servers such as Xephyr.
BobbyTables2
6 hours ago
Yeah, sadly Firefox and Chrome want almost full privileges so that they can sandbox themselves.
X itself always bothers me. Xeyes is cute until one considers the practical implications…
enriquto
4 hours ago
> Xeyes is cute until one considers the practical implications…
what's the problem with xeyes? it reads data on your computer and displays it. Just like vim or cat.
If, for some reason, you want to run a program that you don't trust, you should sandbox it from the outside. But granting full rights to distro-provided programs like vim or xeyes is perfectly sane. Just like you trust your kernel.
mike_hock
3 hours ago
> until one considers the practical implications
You failed at that step.
The practical implication is that every other X11 app can also read your input even when it's not in the foreground.
orangeboats
3 hours ago
> But granting full rights to distro-provided programs like vim or xeyes is perfectly sane
Saying this after the whole XZ utils ordeal has happened is quite interesting.
Can you really guarantee that your distro is not compromised? And if it is compromised, how can you easily _discover_ that a program is doing something strange?
X11 (the one that most people are familiar with, not the locked down one with X security -- because the latter introduces compatibility issues) does not have an access control model where programs can request for specific permissions.
In other words, xeyes would just work(TM) without the user granting it permission to read global mouse pointer position. And simultaneously, the same is true for $compromised_distro_provided_program.
uecker
31 minutes ago
It is the same issue with all sandboxing solutions. If your program does not work without giving it excessive permissions, it does not work. If we want to move to a version with minimal privileges, X would still seem like a good platform to work on this. But one would have to work on it, not decide that everything needs to be rewritten all the time.
TZubiri
3 hours ago
> the whole XZ ordeal
1 malicious package almost got distributed in 20 years of debian history?
>granting full rights to vim or xeyes
I'm not sure I get what's being discussed here. Standard Xorg runs without root already. And Xeyes definitely 100% run without root, I get why you would you run vim on root, to edit root files, but also don't? Especially if you have plugins, run simple programs like echo>> , ed, grep or nano.
throwaway7356
4 hours ago
> But granting full rights to distro-provided programs like vim or xeyes is perfectly sane.
You mean run everything distro-provided as root?
There are reasons systems don't do that any more. Even distro-provided services are often setup in a way to no run with full rights. Can you imaging reasons why this is done?
What was neglected is doing the same on user level, which should be done for pretty much the same reasons.