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  • X is inherently less secure due to the fact alone that, given enough time, new vulnerabilities will come out that will not be patched because X11 is EOL. Yes it has a different security model, but that security model is not very well implemented because X has an enormous code base that, at the end of the day is still not bug free (nothing is). There is a lot of legacy code contained in X that legitimately does not even have a function because there is nothing around today to use it.

    Larger codebase = more moving parts = more code to exploit. That’s the benefit to wayland aside from active support by the X/Wayland devs.



  • You’re missing the point. When you run an x client in wayland, you are still running an x server. Every vulnerability an x server has, xwayland has. I don’t need to name anything specific because you can legitimately go and look this up yourself.

    Don’t think you are fully safe from keylogging in xwayland either, you are only safe from keylogging in wayland apps, xwayland clients can keylog other xwayland clients because x servers can see other x servers, in other words, they are all still very much running seperate PIDs on your system which means at the very least they can still touch each other. XWayland, by default, does not really sandbox clients because why exactly would it need to? Do you realize exactly how much of a feat that would take to truly isolate an x server from the rest of your system? That is an inherent flaw with X itself because X never set out to acheive those goals in the first place.

    If you are at the point where you have to be worried about protecting your xsession or wayland session, you need to make a fresh install and tighten your security accordingly. All that tightening down your window manager does is make an attacker go for a lower hanging fruit on your system, that’s why you should make your machine unfeasible to even attack in the first place. You can go run around and try to tighten every little nook and cranny, but if someone is determined to get into your system, they will eventually get in. The malicious parties we are trying to defend against with general security practices are not nation state hackers, they are skids and standard malware.




  • havokdj@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldI don't know who Wayland is
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    6 months ago

    Wayland is a lot more secure and the way it handles clients is a lot more sane in todays age, but thing is, it is a hell of a lot more complicated if you come from a window manager background, and your choice of applications is incredibly small. Sure you can run a lot of your stuff in XWayland, but what exactly is the point of running wayland if you are going to run less secure X apps with 94% of the same vulnerabilities?

    X is less secure, but the security of your system from the outside is far *faaar more important than the security on the inside. Only when an intruder actually infiltrates your system do you have a real concern, and that’s only talking about remote access. Physical access given enough time is root access.

    A lot of people tout X as being considerably more bloated than wayland which is why the project is basically in maintenance mode, wayland is definitely a lot quicker than X, but X has many reasons including support from literally every single linux application out there, something wayland is very likely never going to acheive even with XWayland.