Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wayland Keylogger

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 121 posts

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#21

Post by indymike »

hertzrat wrote: post #4

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

After dealing with hosting websites for paying customers on shared servers I'm not so sure that you can assume Linux is free of being targeted. Linux the OS may not be targeted, but Linux software like WordPress (and many others) is under constant attack. What is interesting is that the payload the hacker is trying to deliver often is not a rootkit - a bot node can run just fine as a user process on a Linux (or BSD) server. I've had to clean up: evil javascript injected into content, control servers for botnets, email relays, phishing farm software, chat servers and one time a whole CRM system. The one thing that was nice in every case was that Linux did a great job of isolating the hack to a single user's files.

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#22

Post by greggyb »

tinus_hn wrote: post #2

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.

Keepass can take advantage of the secure desktop to unlock the password database, and has multiple methods for entering passwords, including a method that mixes clipboard actions and auto-typing. It's not perfect, and anything that can log keys and monitor the clipboard would be able to sniff passwords. That said, it's a pretty good set of mitigations.

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#23

Post by skymt »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #8

> 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 Wayla…

I'm not sure it's even accurate to say that Wayland closes one of the holes when the hole Wayland closes isn't part of the system's security boundaries. It's like installing a deadbolt in a door standing in the middle of a room.

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#24

Post by eikenberry »

the_duke wrote: post #5

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_…

> relatively small target group

Smaller than you imply as there is no standard Linux desktop for them to target. Not only are there multiple desktops, there are multiple systems for almost everything in Linux. Even seemingly ubiquitous things like .profile and .bashrc aren't everywhere as neither zsh nor fish use those.

TLDR; I think the diversity of the Linux world also helps.

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#25

Post by freeone3000 »

krick wrote: post #11
tubularhells wrote: post #10

SE Linux is enabled by default in Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and Manjaro (iirc), so I stopped reading at the introduction. The exploit presupposes the lack of this basic hardening.

I'm not sure how it helps here. User-level access in enough, isn't it?

SELinux is more fine-grained than user-level access: it implements application-level access. Even if you, as a user, can access a file, an application working on your behalf cannot do so; same for launching applications.

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#26

Post by Spivak »

Jkvngt wrote: post #12
the_duke wrote: post #5

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_…

Forget it? It’s the main selling point of Wayland that keyloggers are impossible.

The selling point is that it becomes possible to have a system that's resistant to keyloggers. If the rest of the system is secure then Wayland doesn't undo that unlike X.

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#27

Post by Spivak »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #17
Jkvngt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget it? It’s the main selling point of Wayland that keyloggers are impossible.

It's hardly the main selling point, but yes, it's often stated in such language that is sufficiently bereft of technical specifics so that the lay user reading it will gain the impression that the aforementioned proof of concept is not possible, but also that, when præsented with it, semantics arguments can be fronted that are more technical, to allow a statement that it wasn't so intended. On a more practical level:…

Giving every application its own X server kinda works but it breaks all the same things that Wayland does. The idea isn't all that different than XWayland.

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#28

Post by Spivak »

skymt wrote: post #23
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #8

> 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 Wayla…

I'm not sure it's even accurate to say that Wayland closes one of the holes when the hole Wayland closes isn't part of the system's security boundaries. It's like installing a deadbolt in a door standing in the middle of a room.

The "user is the only security boundary" ship sailed long ago with, chroot, SELinux, AppArmor, Snap, Flatpak, namespacing. It will continue to be a bumpy ride retrofitting an ecosystem not made for the tighter boundaries but it's still the goal.

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#29

Post by psanford »

Kaze404 wrote: post #18
the_duke wrote: post #5

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_…

I would love to see a real permission system on Linux, where applications have to explicitly ask me before accessing things deemed important. It's never been a problem for me, but it would give me some comfort.

For non-opensource applications (e.g. Zoom) I really like using Firejail[0] to run them within a sandbox. Firejail ships with a good set of default policies which make it explicit what the application gets access to. The filesystem sandboxing is especially comforting.

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

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#30

Post by bartvk »

Kaze404 wrote: post #18
the_duke wrote: post #5

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_…

I would love to see a real permission system on Linux, where applications have to explicitly ask me before accessing things deemed important. It's never been a problem for me, but it would give me some comfort.

This was introduced in macOS at some point (Catalina release?) and I saw a whole bunch of people complain about the number of dialogues they had to go through.

I really like it, though. New applications have to ask whether they can read/write from ~/Documents or ~/Pictures, or read contacts. I agree with you, and also wish something like this existed for modern Linux desktops.

Post reply on HN