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Comment by throwaway_58291 | Hacker News Reader

By the probability of this risk scenario (visit evil.com, be the victim of a successful RCE, with a particular method of privilege escalation that somehow gets all the right details to work) it sure looks to me like you overstated the expected benefit (negative loss).

I do concede that our utility functions may differ, if you actually believe it and not just inflating the importance of this issue.

Also I may have a bias in that I disable JavaScript by default, so the probability of such a risk is much lower. I tried to not make that assumption though, in judging the expected loss.

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You are vastly overstating the difficulty of pivoting X11 access to complete system compromise with the "somehow gets all the right details to work" phrase. It's trivial.

People have literally gotten killed because of this type of attack. Yes, hostile nation-states probably don't care enough about you personally, but there are people for whom this is a life-and-death matter.

The one thing that reduces the impact of this is that it's Firefox on Linux, which is a niche browser on a niche OS, but desktop Linux Firefox is a product that Mozilla officially ships, which means that it's Mozilla's responsibility to protect its users.

> It's hard to overstate how much of a benefit this is in terms of security for those on Linux.

I assumed you talked about "those on Linux", not "those on Linux who have non-negligible probability of being targeted by hostile nation-states".

It's often difficult to step back and re-evaluate initial claims, and we sometimes choose to use tactics like zooming in on improbable contexts to justify them. But I think it's healthy to face criticism that may snap us out of it, so I'm writing this comment. But it's late now, so I will not be able to follow up anymore.

P.S. I don't have GNOME installed :)

Nation states aren't the only threat. There are billion dollar organized crime and fraud networks that have the means to both collect, and successfully weaponize, such RCEs.

It's been a bit since I've looked, but browser RCEs are particularly expensive and coveted. They're a potential vector for 1-click soft/hard roots in homebrew and hacking communities, and of course, 1-click RCEs are invaluable to anyone who has the resources to obtain them and victims to exploit.

I take this to mean that you think they are rare, confirming a part of my assessment on the probability of risk.

Since I cannot reply to your other comment, I will respond here. What proportion of Firefox-Linux users do you think are victims of such RCE attacks?

They are definitely rare, but once they exist they can spread like wildfire because people (usually correctly) trust browsers to sandbox websites. Put another way, browsers run untrusted programs day in and day out on virtually all sorts of otherwise trusted devices (including enterprise devices) so the impact is gigantic.

Good point, why even bother pushing out patches?

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