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Date:      Mon, 29 Aug 2016 10:51:06 +0200
From:      Jan Bramkamp <crest@rlwinm.de>
To:        freebsd-x11@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: making X secure?
Message-ID:  <e9faebc3-8e41-f3ce-83b2-2efd58e41e54@rlwinm.de>
In-Reply-To: <57C2D94D.7040906@yahoo.com>
References:  <57C2D94D.7040906@yahoo.com>

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On 28/08/16 14:30, Jules Gilbert via freebsd-x11 wrote:
> Is this possible?, can X be made secure??
>
> I need X for the Mozilla application family.  Are those weak from a
> security perspective?
>
> At the moment I'm doing other stuff and (this may be a foolish
> thought...,) would accept a quick fix.  Probably a really bad idea, I
> know.  But someone who's apparently good at this has hacked several
> releases of FreeBSD and OpenBSD.  About OpenBSD, as soon as one adds
> (for me, necessary,) applications, it's not as advertised.
>
> Okay, one more time.  Can X be made secure?

X.org has an enormous attack surface and compromising the X11 server can 
allow you to capture all user input (including passwords). You can run a 
nested X11 server to reduce the attack surface and gain some defense in 
depth. You can also run Firefox and/or Thunderbird in a jail. The next 
step would probably be shipping audit records to a remote system with 
auditdistd. You can further lock down the jail with MAC modules if you 
like to play a few rounds of whack a mole with your applications.



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