[Jasper_]

That Wayland keylogger is not the same thing. X11 has several mechanisms (XTest, XRecord, XI raw inputs) to receive a global raw key input stream, accessible to anyone who connects to the X server, without even making a visible window surface. It even bypasses grabs, meaning that your lock screen password entry can be snooped on.

The Wayland keylogger acts like an application; all Wayland compositors will only send key events to the focused surface, so the user has to focus an active surface in order to get key events. Even in the scenario where you've LD_PRELOAD-hooked all applications, you still will never get the lock screen password, as the compositor never sends it out across the wire.

LD_PRELOAD is problematic from a security perspective, but it's not Wayland-specific: the same issue is true for CLI applications and X11 applications, and any attacker with the ability to write files could also just replace your binaries with malicious ones (stuff them somewhere into ~/.hidden, and then add a $PATH entry to the start).

[uecker]

I think you did not understand my point. X11 has several such mechanisms, yes, but it also has the concept of untrusted clients that disallow the use of these mechanisms and could be used to provide safety similar to Wayland. The point is that this mechanism of untrusted X clients was neglected and I gave an explanation way.

[froh]

Yes and your response in the whole thread reading top to bottom was the first one that really taught an old dog a new trick. I've been using gnu on x11 since 1991, been annoyed by fellow student's audio streams on my work station back then, and I've never heard about trusted vs untrusted x11 apps.

I wonder how this debate was mainstream? did some gamers try to squeeze 3 extra percent by taking the protocol out of local stacks? there must have been better ways to do that, without throwing out all X11 benefits?

to this day I'm annoyed I can't have a decent window manager integration on gWSL because the compositor doesn't implement the full window manager protocol.