Re: Proxying Wayland for untrusted clients

Josh DuBois
2021-05-22T17:52:27Z

On May 22, 2021, at 8:05 AM, Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is> wrote:
>
> One of the benefits that Wayland is supposed to have over X11 is
> security. A Wayland application isn't supposed to be able to record the
> screen without user permission, for example. But in most compositors,
> it can, with no restrictions.
<snip>
>
> To solve these problems, I propose a proxy program that sits between
> Wayland clients and the compositor, in the same privelege domain as the
> compositor.
<snip>
> If we can do that, it might be sensible for
> it to live at freedesktop.org? I'm not sure how that works.

I am curious, if you have time, to hear more on why the approach of a proxy vs picking a compositor and implementing security there.

If the problem is that the Wayland community so far has not considered security a priority, it seems that a security proxy may suffer from those same forces. Basically, will it be easier to attract developers or gain widespread adoption of a proxy as opposed to getting buy-in to do security directly in a compositor? You mention writing in a memory safe language and having a compositor neutral solution as technical advantages.

Do you think a proxy is a good choice primarily because it can achieve a better technical result, or is the choice of a new component more a matter of difficulty getting community buy-in from a popular compositor and doing security there? How would you weigh the upsides of a new project against the difficulties of getting a new thing off the ground and adopted?

(This is really just curiosity on my part and my $0.02 from the outside. You may have already had a lot of discussions about that, or even already tried talking to compositor folk and not gotten traction. Seems worth some explicit consideration.)