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Moblin Will Run X Server As Logged-In User, Not Root

Posted by timothy on from the such-a-little-thing-makes-such-a-big-difference dept.

nerdyH writes "An architect of the Moblin Project has announced that Moblin 2.0 for netbooks and nettops is the first Linux distribution to run the X server as the logged-in user, rather than SUID'd to root. The fix to this decades-old security liability comes thanks to 'NRX' (No-root X) technology reportedly developed by Intel, Red Hat, and others in the X community, and the Moblin-sponsored 'Secure X' project. Besides making Linux netbooks a lot more snoop-proof, it seems like this could lead to an X-hosting renaissance of sorts, since you wouldn't be risking the whole system just to open up a specific user's account to remote X servers."

2 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. Confused article. by Timothy+Brownawell · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Linux's SUID X server problem has been kind of a "dirty little secret" for many years. Most modern distributions include a few crude workarounds, such as dimming the display and then freezing X whenever the user is asked to type in a root password. Getting rid of the SUID bit altogether ought to make netbooks powered by Moblin technology much more difficult to snoop on over the network.

    This does not make sense. Graphical sudo wrappers have nothing to do with X being suid, and neither does anything to do with network traffic.

    It seems likely that with NRX technology, you could run X apps over a network with much less risk to the app server (the system that runs the "X client" component, in the backwards terminology of X).

    This is actually backwards, the only place there's less risk is for the system that the X server is running on.

  2. Graphics drivers by Chemisor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If graphics drivers were implemented in the kernel instead of the X server, this problem wouldn't have existed in the first place.