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Comment by preisschild | Hacker News Reader

Are you seriously acting like every application having full access over other applications is not an actual security issue?

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It is for netflix, or the cloud image storage provider that wants to secure against the consumer easily extracting data and going to someone else. The user being able to easily take a program made by a third party and have it completely rearrange the guts of any other program is the basis of consumer security in a world without a unified government keeping commercial interests at bay.

It is, but nothing can be done about it. That's how Linux permissions work. Any app running as me can execute any other app I have permissions to run. It can pipe stdin/out/err, trace it, etc. Why should the desktop apps be different?

See my other comment too.

My desktop apps can’t trace other apps because they don’t have my sudo password. Some of my desktop apps run in containers/snaps or whatnot and other user processes can’t get to their internals without pivoting to root. Apps can’t read each other’s memory because of segmentation.

There is a lot more to desktop inter-app security than “if an app had a root shell then it could compromise things”. A great many attack vectors that we see constantly have a much narrower ingress than that.

You don't need sudo for trace under the same account. You can even attach a debugger and read all app's memory.

Virtualization is another thing entirely. But if you want it that way, then why not simply start a second X for the untrusted app?

Do you also loose sleep over the fact that everyone you let into your home could decide to rearrange your furniture and smash your TV and go trawling through a bunch of private stuff?

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