hunger

hunger, 5 months ago

Usig anything as root is a security risk.

Using any UI application as root is a bigger risk. That’s because every UI toolkit loads plugins and what not from all over the place and runs the code from those plugins (e.g. plugins installed system wide and into random places some environment variables point to). Binary plugins get executed in the context of the application running and can do change every aspect of your program. I wrote a small image plugin to debug an issue once that looked at all widgets in the UI and wrote all the contents of all text fields (even those obfuscated to show only dots in the UI) to disk whenever some image was loads. Plugins in JS or other non-native code are more limited, but UI toolkits tend to have binary plugins.

So if somebody manages to set the some env vars and gets root to run some UI application with those set (e.g. using sudo), then that attacker hit the jackpot. In fact some toolkits will not even bring up any UI when run as root to avoid this.

Running any networked UI application as root is the biggest risk. Those process untrusted data by definition with who knows what set of plugins loaded.

Ideally you run the UI as a normal user and then use sudo to run individual commands as root.

hunger, 5 months ago

Plugins are a code execution vulnerability by design;-) Especially with binary plugins you can call/access/inspect everything the program itself can. All UI toolkits make heavy use of plugins, so you can not avoid those with almost all UI applications.

There are non-UI applications with similar problems though.

Running anything with network access as root is an extra risk that effects UI and non-UI applications in the same way.

hunger, 5 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

That interface is let any random app take screenshots of anything running on the same server without any way for the user to know it happens.

I am so glad that interface is gone, especially when running proprietary apps.

hunger, 6 months ago

The one thing you can learn from sysv init isnthat asking devs to pitncode into their programs or into starter scripts does not work. They will not bother: Those will notmworkmcross platform.

So you need to cebtralize that task. You can either write a wrapper program that sandboxes starts applications in a sandbox or do that whereever the programs as are started anyway.

A separate sandboxing app that starts services complicates configuration: You basically need to configure two things the starter and the service. On the up-side you have the sandboxing code separate. Merging the sandboxing into the program starting the service makes configuration simple but adds moremcode into the the starter program.

So it is basically a decision on what you value more. Systemd decided to favor simpler configuration. The cost for adding the sandboxing is small anyway: It’s all Linux kernel functionality that does need a bit of configuration to get rolling, with much of that code being in the systemd-init anyway: It uses similar functionality to actually separate the processes it starts from each other to avoid getting confused by programs restarted and thusnchanging PIDs – something still a thing in many other inits.

I am convinced that making sandboxing easy does a lot formits adoption. No admin will change the entire startup configuration to add a sandboxing wrapper around the actual service. It is way more likely for them to drop in a override file with a couple of lines and without any problems when upstream changes command line options.

hunger, 6 months ago

To be fair: snaps can work for all kinds of things all over the stack from the kernel to individual applications, while flatpak just does applications. Canonical is building a lot around those abilities to handle lower level things, so I guess it makes sense for them.

IMHO flatpak does the applications better and more reliably and those are what I personally care for, so I personally stay away from snaps.

hunger, 7 months ago

It is the same as with all logins: It goes through the Pluggable Authentication Modules. So you need a service that uses PAM (they basically all do for a long time now) and the configuration of that service needs to include homed as an option to authenticate users. Check /etc/pam.d for the config files.

hunger, 7 months ago

I use toolbox: Distrobox is a pretty horrible shell script and deleted parts of my home directory when I tried that.

In the end I just pointed toolbox to a script named podman that just adjusts the setup to what I need, implementing the missing features I wanted that way.

hunger, 7 months ago

Removing dump stuff to keep a community relevant, on topic and with a good signal to noise ratio is not censorship. Claiming so is just dumb.

hunger, 7 months ago

Yes, wayland by design does not let random applications grab events intended for other applications nor does it let random applications take screenshots at any point in time showing other applications screens. This requires applications to do screen sharing differently, and it indeed breaks random applications sending events to random other applications. That is basically all you wail about and an absolutely necessary property of any sensible system and it is very embarrassing that it took so long to get this.

hunger, 7 months ago

Small communities have a hard time staying up to date. X11 was ported decades ago, when non Linux OSes had more mind share and commercial backing. I doubt anyone could port X11 if that was the new thing mainly developed on Linux today.

hunger, 7 months ago

Censorship is about you being limited in the actions you can take to express yourself. It is not about cushioning you from the consequences of those actions from the people around you.

You obviously were allowed to take action: The contents was apparent upon on a forum and here as well. People reacted to your actions: Admins removed your contents and blocked you and I am telling you that your understanding of wayland as well as politics is limited.

Deal with it.