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Wayland Keylogger

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Re: Wayland Keylogger

#2

Post by tinus_hn »

Windows is arguably more secure because it has the secure desktop that isn’t controlled by user applications. Unfortunately it doesn’t help with all kinds of password entry.

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#4

Post by hertzrat »

It’s pretty amazing that after all these years there is so little malware on Linux and in foss. The community really has somehow remained almost completely trustworthy. I don’t know of many other examples of that. Nobody trusts free as in beer software, but if it’s open source, we have barely had to even think about whether it’s safe or not because it has almost always been so - even tiny one-maintainer projects

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#5

Post by the_duke »

I do use Linux (almost) exclusively, but I'm well aware of the security limitations.

Forget this keylogger. All you need is to somehow write a single line into .profile or .bashrc, which basically every executed program can do, and you own the user account. You can intercept every program with wrappers by changing PATH or adding desktop entries in .local/share/applications, extract all data from applications, use LD_PRELOAD like shown in the submission ... the possibilities are endless.

There isn't even a single decent dynamic firewall with those annoying popups.

Apart from SELinux, there is also firejail [1], which I use to sandbox browsers. Flatpak and Snap are also trying to solve both the packaging and the sandboxing aspect, with moderate success. They also increase the risk due to lack of centralized package ownership, so require a very solid sandbox.

The only reason why the Linux desktop is somewhat secure is the reliance on official package repos, the trustworthiness of the open source communities, and the and the relatively small target group.

I do believe that the path forward has to be Mac OS/Android/iOS style sandboxing - especially for everything not directly from an official repo, but there seems to be relatively little interest in the ecosystem.

Non Linux specific sidenote: ever notice how many VS Code extensions download random binaries from the net? Or just that they can execute arbitrary code? Compromising one of those could lead to some glorious returns for malicious actors, with potential access to lots of source code, credentials and internal networks.

Bottom line: if you touch any sensitive data or work with secure systems at all, you have to be extremely paranoid about your machine - no matter what OS you are on.

[1] https://firejail.wordpress.com/

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#6

Post by theamk »

this seems completely miss the point of wayland security.

Of course if you run the programs under same account you can keylog them. You can also connect to Chrome and steal the cookies directly, wrap terminal to install pty loggers, backdoor ssh and so on.

The real point of wayland security is you can safely run multiple user accounts on the same desktop. And the LD_PRELOAD tricks (or PATH tricks etc..) do not work across accounts, unless you are doing something stupid.

I wish people would stop saying silly things like "But for any possible way to break it, I could add countermeasures as well. Applications could use 'getenv' ....". That's not how you break keyloggers! You break them with privilege separation. The least-code version would be:

1. Create a separate user for web browsing, with its homedir and all

2. Create "/etc/sudoers.d" entry to launch browser which does not require password, but also does not allow any arguments, enforces HOME and only passes through a small subset of env vars

3. Launch your browser with "sudo -H -u browser-user firefox". Make it a desktop shortcut or something so you are not tempted to enter your password if someone messes with the shortcut.

that's it -- this will stop this attack, and many others, cold. And will not require any SELinux.

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#7

Post by Kaze404 »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #3

So, all the fuzz about Wayland security and how it is good security to kill window managers at will... comes out totally void.

Isn't one of the most popular Wayland clients a window manager? I'm confused.

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#8

Post by rhn_mk1 »

> This program is in no way meant as criticism of the Wayland project. It simply demonstrates that creating a secure desktop requires more than just a few server-side restrictions.

This is the right takeaway. Unfortunately, given the previous paragraph and the name, I suspect a lot of people are going to think "Wayland is insecure, so why bother?". The reality is closer to "many parts of Linux are insecure, and Wayland closes one of the holes".

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