Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> So it breaks the entire linux philosophy of using input and output streams to pipe data between different modular applications?

Not really. To use your analogy, the way that X works - every application being able to read the framebuffer of any other - is the equivalent of every application running as root and being able to read and modify any file on the system. When you consider that applications running under Wayland may include e.g. banking details, any app being able to read that is like anything being able to read /etc/shadow.

If your computer is perfectly secure, with no untrusted code running, that's great - and also far more secure than 90% desktop computers out there.




Maybe a stupid question, but can't any program read the memory of other programs from the same user? Can't you attach to it for debugging?


On many systems, and by default, yes - but the other part of what's going on is that Wayland allows applications to be sandboxed like they couldn't be before, as they can no longer use your X server as a conduit to spawn an unsandboxed shell and run commands. You can, today, run e.g. Firefox in a sandboxed environment and be certain it can't access anything you don't want it to.


AFAIK graphical application disttribution/sandboxing systems such as Flatpak pretty much require this to be avaialable if they ever want to provide reasonably secure sandboxing & might be already making use of this on Wayland systems.


Not necessarily. Newer Linux distros have ptrace disabled on all non-child processes. You can still turn off this protection if you need to.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: