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Wayland Keylogger

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Re: Wayland Keylogger

#41

Post by Jkvngt »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #36
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

What dialect of English are you using?

Seems like a GPT-3 post to me.

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#43

Post by Blikkentrekker »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #36
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

What dialect of English are you using?

I am not a native speaker; it can thus be assumed to be a combination of many different dialects. My pronunciation, however:

- features the trap–bath split

- is non-rhotic, has a fairly consistent linking-r, but no intrusive-r.

- ordinarily features the whine–wine merger, but does split them again in stressed interrogatives

- does not undergo flapping of alveolar stops

- ocasionally realizes fortis alveolar stops as glottal stops intervocallically, but never in a stressed context

- realizes fortis alveolar alveolar stops as affricativess before /u/ and /i/ in a stressed context, rather than as aspirates

- features l-vocalization in the coda of syllables

- features neither yod-dropping nor yod-coalescence such that “soot” “shoot” and “suit” are a minimal triplet

- fronts /ai/ to a realization of [ɑe̯]

I know of no actual English dialect that combines these features, as expected of a non-native speaker, with the exception of it's non-rhotic nature, it seems to gravitate towards a realization that mostly combines the different kdistinctions made in most dialects, assimilating splits, but not mergers.

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#44

Post by theamk »

Jkvngt wrote: post #40
jstarks wrote: post #9

Why does this say (2021) when the last commit was in 2014?

Still works great, too! How long until Wayland developers fix this, another seven years?

Ugh, they cannot fix it because this is not something that wayland can fix at all.

Look, if you have user access to the account, you can get its data. Even if you somehow make Wayland 100% secure, you can still replace “firefox” shortcut with malicious version which also steals all your passwords. No windowing aystem involved at all.

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#45

Post by jamesponddotco »

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_…

Aside from wrapping applications with Firejail, I would also recommend setting up AppArmor[1] or SELinux in enforce mode, as most Linux distributions do not do that by default[2].

Things will break from time to time until you modify the default profiles, and you will need to write profiles for applications that do not ship with one by default, but it is worth the time you spent.

[1] A MAC just like SELinux, but with easier syntax. It is the default on Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE, and others.

[2] I think Fedora does enforce SELinux by default, though.

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#46

Post by Izkata »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #43
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What dialect of English are you using?

I am not a native speaker; it can thus be assumed to be a combination of many different dialects. My pronunciation, however: - features the trap–bath split - is non-rhotic, has a fairly consistent linking-r, but no intrusive-r. - ordinarily features the whine–wine merger , but does split them again in stressed interrogatives - does not undergo flapping of alveolar stops - ocasionally realizes fortis alveolar stops as…

I'm guessing "præsented" is what caught GP's eye. I've never seen that before, was is supposed to be "presented" or is that how it would be spelled in your native language/dialect?

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#47

Post by Jkvngt »

theamk wrote: post #44
Jkvngt wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still works great, too! How long until Wayland developers fix this, another seven years?

Ugh, they cannot fix it because this is not something that wayland can fix at all. Look, if you have user access to the account, you can get its data. Even if you somehow make Wayland 100% secure, you can still replace “firefox” shortcut with malicious version which also steals all your passwords. No windowing aystem involved at all.

But bleargh, why do Wayland proponents always seem to bring up keyloggers? That’s icky.

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#48

Post by lousken »

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.

for debian and ubuntu i think you meant apparmor not selinux

except for fedora they don't support selinux well

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#49

Post by erik_seaberg »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #37
erik_seaberg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, Wayland doesn't define a protocol for using the server's hardware to render. Waypipe requires rendering at the client (probably in software, because datacenter GPUs are a rare extra) followed by a video codec for remoting.

Yes, in both cases it is not not for technical reasons. Many Wayland compositors simply lack support for nVidia cards as they use a different protocol than all the others, and many graphics acceleration calls are simply not implemented through nested servers.

What I’m getting at is that Wayland has better hardware acceleration only of compositing. It doesn’t seem to have any support for rendering shapes into pixels, even though that’s mostly why hardware accelerators were invented.

Re: Wayland Keylogger

#50

Post by theamk »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #16
theamk wrote: post #6

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 a…

> this seems completely miss the point of wayland security. The point is that Wayland security is useless because the security boundary on Unix is fundamentally the user account: > 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…

I think you are mixing "official wayland reference" and some "advocates".

The offical Wayland reference does not talk about malware at all, as this is not not something that windowing protocol can solve. The best they can do is to promise "client isolation" -- which means that one client cannot affect other via wayland protocol

I am sure there are some Wayland advocates somewhere who are making dubious claims. This does not mean the Wayland security is useless -- this just means that specific systems are not secure yet. People on the internet can claim all sorts of crazy things, and you should not hold what random bloggers say against the whole system.

Re X11 sandboxing, from my reading, the general opinion is that X11 is impossible to secure. They did SECURITY extension, but it apparently does not work well, see this wonderful quote from Debian's ssh manpage [0]

> Debian-specific: X11 forwarding is not subjected to X11 SECURITY extension restrictions by default, because too many programs currently crash in this mode.

What other X11 isolation mechanisms are there? Xnest breaks seamless window switching, things like VNC introduce a ton of latency.

So before the Wayland we did not have a desktop with solid client isolation, so not one cared about process isolation either. What's the point of running browser from trusted account if any random desktop app can steal its keystrokes? The best one could do was Quebes OS, and this had plenty of its own overhead.

Now with more people switching to Wayland this should help. It's far past the time that people stop assuming that "one human user" == "one entry in /etc/passwd" and start separating services by account.

[0] https://manpages.debian.org/buster/openssh-client/ssh.1.en.h...

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