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Wayland vs. X – Overview

wayland.freedesktop.org

141–150 of 186 posts

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#141
post #49

I feel like the debate between Wayland and X always bring more a general discussion about technology refactoring and modularity. To me be, the big question is not why freedesktop.org or redhat is doing all of this, they're a company and they have their needs. It is why distro maintainers have chosen to adopt those technologies(systemd,Wayland, others?), not that those options are especially bad but to me,but they rea…

Wayland feels more customizable and modular to me, in that it is a set of protocols and optional extensions with multiple implementations instead of one server (Xorg) to rule them all. This feels much more in the Linuxy/FOSSy mindset to me. In fact, many, many people complain about the multitude of wayland implementations as fracturing and a division of work.

I'm not saying that I don't see the benefits of all building on a single server, but I can't say a bazaar-style development of multiple implementations and protocol extensions feels at all corporate.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#142
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when did Windows or Macs ever have great window managers? If you just ran a web browser directly on the hardware (or native window system in full screen mode) instead of bothering with non-great X11 or Wayland or Windows or Mac window systems, then you could write great window managers using open standards that ran identically across Linux, Mac, and Windows, plus mobile and VR devices too. https://news.ycombina…

Better than what most GNU/Linux folks use, many of whom apparently would be quite happy using twm.

Ah, twm is still better than Gnome.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#143
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plus the attack angle is someone having permission to execute apps on your machine, there's plenty of other nasty things they could do. No, the attack angle is either a untrusted app running in a sandbox (fatpak, snap or crosvm or qemu with wayland passtrough[1]) with only a connection to the compositor or a trusted app running in a sandbox getting exploited, any apps handling foreign data is suspect here (Web brow…

Everybody who uses web video conferencing will give their web-browser permission to record the screen. This already takes a huge chunk out of the security advantages. The advantage is not zero, but it doesn't seem to be as big of a win as one might want.

> but it doesn't seem to be as big of a win as one might want.

That's a huge win. Firefox is a mainstream product with a ton of attention. And I get it from upstream repositories, it's not something I'm compiling myself.

If I can get away with giving 2-3 apps total on my computer screen recording permissions (OBS, Firefox, maybe a screenshot tool or an accessibility client), that is a massive reduction in attack surface, that would be a very large security win.

It would be great if the primary attack vector for recording my screen was an application with decades of sandboxing efforts going into preventing untrusted code from doing things like recording my screen without my knowledge.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't only the transport layer of X insecure? That could be swapped out with another layer. With Wayland you have to use VNC which is fine for local networks, but not for remote ones.

My understanding is that any app which has access to X (so any windowed app) had full access to all other apps which have access. So, any app with a window can read the input from any other app on the same system, e.g. your sudo password. Or, take a screenshot of your bank info in Firefox.

Ahh ok, I never knew that. That sounds horribly wrong.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#145
post #49

I feel like the debate between Wayland and X always bring more a general discussion about technology refactoring and modularity. To me be, the big question is not why freedesktop.org or redhat is doing all of this, they're a company and they have their needs. It is why distro maintainers have chosen to adopt those technologies(systemd,Wayland, others?), not that those options are especially bad but to me,but they rea…

What do you think of Arcan as an alternative to Wayland and X?

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#146
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody who uses web video conferencing will give their web-browser permission to record the screen. This already takes a huge chunk out of the security advantages. The advantage is not zero, but it doesn't seem to be as big of a win as one might want.

> but it doesn't seem to be as big of a win as one might want. That's a huge win. Firefox is a mainstream product with a ton of attention. And I get it from upstream repositories, it's not something I'm compiling myself. If I can get away with giving 2-3 apps total on my computer screen recording permissions (OBS, Firefox, maybe a screenshot tool or an accessibility client), that is a massive reduction in attack surf…

Firefox contains essentially 99+% of the untrusted application code I run, and I suspect this (or Chromium) is the case for many others too.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't even mentioned which wayland compositor you are using. Which is one of the biggest problems with Wayland - there isn't just one Wayland but Gnome Wayland and KDE Wayland and wlroots-based Wayland and Gamescope Wayland. What functionality is available and working and using which API varies between all of these. This includes really basic things like window decorations. This is different from X where the co…

Yes this. If you use gnome or kde you probably will have no issue with the transition to Wayland. If you use any other window manager then the transition will be painful because there's a bunch of things that don't simply map over from x WMs to Wayland compositors. I just did this switch and found it incredibly frustrating. Simple things like, "I would like to be able to log out and return to my greeter" don't just w…

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Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it doesn't seem to be as big of a win as one might want. That's a huge win. Firefox is a mainstream product with a ton of attention. And I get it from upstream repositories, it's not something I'm compiling myself. If I can get away with giving 2-3 apps total on my computer screen recording permissions (OBS, Firefox, maybe a screenshot tool or an accessibility client), that is a massive reduction in attack surf…

Firefox contains essentially 99+% of the untrusted application code I run, and I suspect this (or Chromium) is the case for many others too.

Great! Firefox is also the app on my computer that does by-far the best job sandboxing untrusted code. It's good for us to be running most of our untrusted code in that environment, and even better for us to be blocking untrusted operations outside of that environment.

I genuinely don't understand the issue, it's a big security win if I can close off permissions on my system and have them open just for the apps that have good sandboxing around their untrusted code. Bonus points if the app in question allows per-domain screen recording permissions, which Firefox does.

I would go so far as to say that (one of) the reasons you run 99+% of your untrusted application code in Firefox is probably because Firefox is one of the very few places on your computer where it's safe to run that code. So it's a big win if we can start pulling some of those same sandboxing ideas into the native world; maybe that makes it easier to use more native apps for some tasks. It's a big win if I can treat apps on my computer the same way that I treat a random website.

Also keep in mind that "untrusted" is not a binary state. I pretty much only run apps on my computer that I "trust", but do they need to be able to record my screen? No, and I love the possibility of not needing to worry quite as much about what happens if they get compromised.

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There's a somewhat strange notion here that because people do everything in the browser per-app privileges don't matter. But in fact, the reason the browser's security model works and the desktop's doesn't is because the browser has per-domain privileges and permissions, and it's not that per-app permissions don't matter, it's that they do matter and the lack of them is why we centralize untrusted code into one of the few apps on our computers that has per-"app" permissions. Browser permissions work because they are granular, you can grant Zoom access to record your desktop without granting access to Facebook.

So maybe if the desktop copies that, maybe far in the future you won't need to run everything in your web browser just to feel secure. But as it stands with X11 I feel a lot more comfortable using a browser to record my screen specifically because it has privileges and permissions around that are segmented per-domain/"app". The lack of sensible security controls on the desktop is a contributing factor to why people don't use the desktop, and being able to lock that in and restrict the scope of where screen recording can happen does make me feel a lot more secure about my desktop.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this. If you use gnome or kde you probably will have no issue with the transition to Wayland. If you use any other window manager then the transition will be painful because there's a bunch of things that don't simply map over from x WMs to Wayland compositors. I just did this switch and found it incredibly frustrating. Simple things like, "I would like to be able to log out and return to my greeter" don't just w…

[flagged]

> "Things don't work the way they do in x.org"

That is not what I said, please don't misquote me. I said:

> [things] don't _just_ work like they do in x.org

Maybe it wasn't clear in my post above so let me clarify. A lot of thing "just work" in x.org and don't in wayland compositors. That is the complaint. That things which were easy are now hard.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#150
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than what most GNU/Linux folks use, many of whom apparently would be quite happy using twm.

Ah, twm is still better than Gnome.

For the folks which the only use of X Windows is to manage xterm sessions.

I was one of those people, in 1994.

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