[1]: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/blob/master/doc/Xnamespa...
Sorry, but did I miss news about a keylogger epidemic? On Linux?
In all seriousness, is this solving an actual problem or an imagined one?
And even assuming a 'Yes': A problem that isn't better solved elsewhere? How did the keylogger get access to the system and its desktop session? What else does it have access to?
The sandbox replaces the regular X11 server with Xpra or Xephyr server. This prevents X11 keyboard loggers and screenshot utilities from accessing the main X11 server.
https://firejail.wordpress.com/documentation-2/x11-guide
It's not a common issue, but obviously a security concern to make it so easy for keyloggers to record your keypresses or screen. I currently prefer X11 to Wayland, and I'd love if this problem was possible to address without Firejail. I use Firejail for other sandboxing tasks, but sandboxing X11 is too impractical.
Really? You think they'd just push for a _firewall_. Wouldn't that just solve the actual problem? Oh, wait, yea, X11 disabled TCP networking by default more than a decade ago.
> it cannot use the active X11 connection to spy on your keyboard.
You understand what /dev/input/* is, right?
> I understand that this means this blog post lacks substance.
The whole undertaking lacks substance.
Too many projects drank the early 2000s kool-aid and thought they would get a second suck at the salve (a.k.a "start from scratch"). It never worked out and you just fraction an already annoyed userbase into an overtly warring userbase. I can't think of anything more wasteful of talent and energy.
I personally think attitudes like yours have destroyed this site.
You shouldn't process this forum as a social club or a social opportunity.
neat. I mean, the site seems fine to me. Seems to be working fine. I got downvoted for my observation but you'll be upvoted for saying I broke something, so maybe it was already broken when you got here.
Also running xfishtank on someone's root window. So many things you could do.
What was clever about it was that each window got its own view of the keyboard and mouse. Literally their own virtual devices in /dev. Each window only saw what went on when that window was in focus, and for the mouse, it only saw what the mouse was doing when the mouse was within the boundaries of the window and that window was directly under the cursor (no windows between the cursor and the window in question.)
9P isn't encrypted, so these remote sessions weren't encrypted, but the Bell Labs folks knew that X11 security wasn't good and seem to have evolved it well. I wonder what things would be like if we didn't latch onto 40 year old operating systems like our lives depended on them.
If we can't get a useful Plan9 going (one that has a web browser and to which applications can easily be ported) maybe we can bring X11 forward a bit with inspiration from Plan 9. Wayland has been "2 years away" for about 15 years, and that shows no signs of changing.
I'm told that the entire source code for Plan 9 can be held in the mind of a single person, and that any skilled C developer can read what's going on with ease. I don't know if that's true, but if such a display server has semi-obvious improvements over X11, maybe we can come up with an X12 which adopts these improvements. We do not need to maintain backwards compatibility, we only need to support X11 and X12 at the same time, I imagine.
rnhmjoj•6mo ago
Unless you're doing SELinux or using some tool like firejail, absolutely nothing?
The average desktop is completely insecure, regardless of the display protocol. If a program is running as your user it's already game over: it can do whatever it likes. For example, I can simply change your shell profile to add an LD_PRELOAD shim, hook some libc syscall wrapper and run arbitrary code in any user process. There's no need to log key presses.
uecker•6mo ago
marcodiego•6mo ago
I really don't know this is the best place to ask, but I don't know anywhere to ask you, so... Is C2Y getting any generic programming features? I'd really love the one with _Type as a new type that stores a type.
uecker•6mo ago
bitwize•6mo ago
uecker•6mo ago
tialaramex•6mo ago
In this case, again it's not important because in our timeline X11 is old, you might proxy the clipboard feature, with a trusted and untrusted connection, the untrusted connection needs to be careful because it's exposed to arbitrary nastiness from potentially hostile untrusted clipboard-using software - the trusted one talks to everybody else. So an example is you might decide to sanitize text, strip out invisible control characters, and exclude "rich" text formats that might conceal attacks. Or you might allow some images but only after previewing them and constraining their properties, no 18GB GIFs please, yes it's technically possible to encode a huge truecolor image as a single GIF no I don't want that in my clipboard.
Is this something we should try to implement? Probably not, but in a world where people try to kite surf across the English channel it's nowhere close to the craziest hobby.
eqvinox•6mo ago
For an X server to be network exposed, you first have to either SSH forward it or remove the nowadays-default "-nolisten TCP", and then either get the xauth secret or have the user do 'xhost +'.
At that point I'm gonna say the attacker earned their keylogger access.
And you or your distro might consider patching out the TCP variant.
bitwize•6mo ago
rnhmjoj•6mo ago
True, this is probably the only real use case. X11 forwarding in OpenSSH (ssh -X) does in fact use this extension by default.
anthk•6mo ago
it's great for this.
rlpb•6mo ago
cxr•6mo ago
account42•6mo ago
johnnyjeans•6mo ago
xorg security measures are a different matter from stopping any random program from writing to your filesystem. broaden the conversation to be about all security across all attack surfaces under all conditions and nothing is safe. i'm still not gonna run everything as root.
porridgeraisin•6mo ago
Edit: other than sandboxing, but I'm targeting this at the Great Wayland Security Theater.