Comment by talldayo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by talldayo | Hacker News Reader

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> And yet, empirically, jank is far more common on Wayland than X11

It depends on the type of jank you're talking about. It's wholly disingenuous to characterize Wayland as janky but x11 as not - the jank inherent to x11 is what made the original Xorg developers start making Wayland in the first place. Empirically, if x11 was perfectly fine there would be no motivation to design a successor.

x11 gets the first-mover advantage of a lot of implementations and a straightforward design goal, but that's about it. It's not secure enough to recommend as a serious alternative to Mac and Windows users, and it's too slow and unopinionated to present a friendly face to new users. Features like 1:1 trackpad gestures, genuine HDR pipelines and a locked compositor framerate are all getting to the point that regular consumers expect them as default.

If you want to keep using x11, it's unlikely someone is going to take it away from you. But it's on track for depreciation and hasn't been actively developed in years. Recommending it as a panacea to new users is a bad idea.

> It's not secure enough to recommend as a serious alternative to Mac and Windows users

The security risk of X11 is theoretical, not practical. Yes, X11 programs can maliciously keylog each other, but this just isn't a thing that actually happens. And even if you do start installing random malware from the internet like a classic windows user, Wayland isn't going to prevent you from screwing yourself anyway. To actually be safe while installing and running malicious applications you need extensive sandboxing. Wayland can be one part of that sandboxing but is useless without the rest (to prevent the malware from stealing user files including credentials, using LD_PRELOAD hacks or similar to keylog other applications anyway, etc), and no distro suitable for recommending to Windows/MacOS newbs has the rest of the requisite sandboxing. The sandboxing touted by Wayland advocates is very esoteric and without all that sandboxing, a newb using Wayland has to exercise just as much caution when downloading software as if he were using X11.

> Yes, X11 programs can maliciously keylog each other, but this just isn't a thing that actually happens.

A simple search leads me to this: https://github.com/anko/xkbcat

There isn't a real attack using it yet, only because attacking Desktop Linux is a really unprofitable endeavor (considering the marketshare, the ROI must be very low).

> To actually be safe while installing and running malicious applications you need extensive sandboxing

FWIW, X11 is unsandboxable unless you run a second X server on top of your current server [0]. Which is fine, but you need to consider that most, if not all sandboxing solutions on Linux that "newbs" use, like Flatpak, do not employ such technique when running sandboxed X11 applications.

The "security by default" behavior of Wayland limits the possible attack surface a lot, without requiring the end user to understand all the nitty details involved.

[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bubblewrap#Sandboxing_X11

You're not telling me anything I don't already know and haven't already explained. X11 keyloggers are trivial, and virtually never seen in the wild. X11 makes sandboxing impossible, but that doesn't matter because I'm not going to waste my time on something like Qubes anyway, and newbs from Windows aren't being directed to setups like that either. They're all installing Mint or Ubuntu where the security of Wayland is nullified by the absense of sandboxing.

>newbs from Windows aren't being directed to setups like that either. They're all installing Mint or Ubuntu where the security of Wayland is nullified by the absense of sandboxing.

This cannot be more further from the truth. Amongst the newcomers, it is rather popular nowadays for them to use Flatpak-bundled apps, especially with the rise of SteamOS (the Deck essentially) lots of Linux newcomers are in fact first exposed to Flatpak and running untrusted executables in a sandbox.

And the most prominent "untrusted executable" today to those newcomers has to be Bottles, which is a nice GUI wrapper for Wine and is sandboxed (if you enable wine-wayland, of course).

I wouldn't trust flatpak enough to run a truly untrusted executable. I am sure flatpak's isolation is full of holes unrelated to windowing.

But I don't think a game purchased through steam counts as untrusted.

>I wouldn't trust flatpak enough to run a truly untrusted executable. I am sure flatpak's isolation is full of holes unrelated to windowing.

As compared to running untrusted programs completely naked?

>But I don't think a game purchased through steam counts as untrusted.

Bottles is there for people to run any Win32 program, not just Steam games. And I shouldn't have to tell you how many malicious Win32 programs there are.

Just google the criticisms of flatpak from a security perspective. They're out there.

Containerization on Linux was never intended to be a security feature for totally untrusted, malicious code. It's isolation for trusted code. If your scenario relies on securely running untrusted executables in a Linux container you are doing stupid things.

I am well aware of the weak points of Flatpak. But are you suggesting that running applications in a container is not more secure than running an executable completely naked?

You see: If you want absolute security, for sure, go for a full-fledged VM! Or run something like QubesOS. It is a completely reasonable decision.

However, malice certainly has degrees, and the "mildly malicious" programs most likely cannot take advantage of sandbox escaping exploits. If Flatpak can stop 95% of all attacks (relative to running a program completely without sandboxing), that is already a win in my book.

But I will note again that X11 is a big hole (as in, almost a complete free-for-all) for sandbox escaping in Flatpak.

You seem to think a lot of things that aren't security boundaries are security boundaries. There have been VM escapes too. VMs are not for running untrusted OS images you get from end users.

I'm done with this thread, have a nice day.

Has there ever been a single instance of a game from Steam including an X11 keyloggers? These threats are off in fantasy land.

I am not sure where you got the impression of me talking about only "Steam games". Bottles allows you to run any Win32.

And besides that, "these threats are off in fantasy land" is an invalid defense in my opinion, considering the (quite sophisticated) XZ Utils backdoor happened not too long ago! Like I said, if such an attack towards X11 hasn't been deployed in the wild, it can only suggest such endeavor is unprofitable, not because the threats are fantastical.

XZ utils backdoor could have exploited X11, but didn't. And the most common Wayland configurations wouldn't have protected people from the backdoored utility; only extremely paranoid and therefore esoteric setups might have.

> And the most common Wayland configurations wouldn't have protected people from the backdoored utility

If the attacker decided to backdoor an utility and make use of X11, it is most likely the backdoored utility will listen to keyboard events, read the bitmaps of other X11 clients.

And there's nothing that can stop the backdoor from doing so on X11...

Anyways, if you are saying the Wayland security policies are unneeded because there hasn't been an attack on X11 (this is the fundamental disagreement between us), consider the following: You don't install doors in your premise, because there hasn't been a case of burglary in your neighborhood?

Why is X11 unsandboxable? A similar but reverse approach to Xwayland, something like waylandX could be used to be part of the overall sandbox approach to run untrusted applications. That would have the advantage that the severe restrictions and feature degradations of wayland are only applied to those untrusted sandboxed applications, not everything.

Ultimately, X11 opens up everything. What you suggest (WaylandX) is essentially allow-by-default.

When this is the case and there is a supply chain attack, what you think is a trusted application (and therefore not running under "WaylandX") can very well keylog you or take screenshots of your desktop without your consent.

In a deny-by-default model ala Wayland, applications will have to ask for permissions before they can do something considered to be privileged.

> Yes, X11 programs can maliciously keylog each other, but this just isn't a thing that actually happens.

Are you really saying keyloggers do not exist in the wild???

> Wayland can be one part of that sandboxing but is useless without the rest

Yes but that is the point, and if you turn it the other way around X11 usually makes the rest of the sandboxing useless.

I am saying that X11 users getting hit with keyloggers is extremely rare if it happens at all. It's trivial to make such a keyloggers but that doesn't mean it's common for the programs users install to do it.

And yes, X11 makes that sandboxing useless, but that sandboxing isn't in play anyway because we're talking about noobs from Windows.

I think it is dangerous to feel yourself as superior. UNIX veterans can also be victim of supply chain attack, either from their distro package manager, a language module manager, a malicious flatpak with too much access, a trojaned appimage from a supposedly reputable vendor, etc.

Superior? All I'm doing is sticking to programs in my distro's repos. Such programs including malicious keyloggers is unheard of. And if a maintainer turns evil or let's something slip through by accident, the damage they could do is hardly mitigated by Wayland. Thankfully, this virtually never happens

In principle I am also vulnerable to something like a RCE zero day in Firefox turning an otherwise trusty program into malware which exploits X11's open nature, but again, this sort of thing actually happening is unheard of.

I'm not superior, I'm just trying to keep a realistic grip on the threats I face. Modern security culture is fixated on what is theoretically possible, I care more about what is actually likely.

> the damage they could do is hardly mitigated by Wayland.

I disagree. How do you hijack interprocess communication on a Wayland device? I can tell you in very certain steps how to manipulate an x11 client but outside hijacking /dev/ I can't imagine a similar attack on Wayland.

If you aren't sandboxes you can edit the user's environment to swap out their programs with backdoored copies.

There's no rule that an X11 server has to send all keypresses to all processes.

But the core framework of every x11 server relies on a loop that does poll HID connected to your machine for events. You can have an x11 server running with no windows connected and your keypresses will still be broadcast to any program that knows where to look.

That's exactly the same as Wayland, isn't it? Every Wayland compositor also polls HIDs connected to your machine for events. And if your Wayland compositor has permission to open those HIDs when running as your user account, so does any other program you run, regardless of Wayland or X.

> x11 gets the first-mover advantage of a lot of implementations and a straightforward design goal, but that's about it. It's not secure enough to recommend as a serious alternative to Mac and Windows users, and it's too slow and unopinionated to present a friendly face to new users.

I've been recommending it as a serious alternative for years, and it's always presented a friendly face.

> Features like 1:1 trackpad gestures, genuine HDR pipelines and a locked compositor framerate are all getting to the point that regular consumers expect them as default.

I have never heard anyone not already a Linux user comment on even one of those as a problem.

>I have never heard anyone not already a Linux user comment on even one of those as a problem

....because Windows and Mac users have not had these problems since 2006?

That's not what he said.

>I have never heard anyone not already a Linux user comment on even one of those as a problem.

Those specific words are uttered by Linux users, true. However, Linux beginners _do_ notice some X11 issues, it's just that very frequently they only know "something" is off but not why they feel so.

From anecdotal experience, touchpad gestures are actually something my friend complained so YMMV. We ended up making a file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ to configure the synaptics driver. Another experience had to do with screen tearing, I helped them fix it by installing a compositor.

To be fair, my anecdotal coworker evidence with Wayland has been "the Webex client doesn't work" with the ten-second remedy of showing them how to set their default desktop back to X11.

That only tells us X11 has a first-mover advantage. Wayland supports screencasting too.

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