Malicious KDE theme can wipe out all your data

wisha@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 185 points –
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13397700

Malicious KDE theme can wipe out all your data

Or is it just buggy?

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I thought wayland was supposed to improve security. Were the past 18 years a lie?

This is such a dumb comment. Jesus.

"I thought passwords were meant to improve security! So how come I got a virus????"

Bro does not know what a display server does

They should be more specific. This is just false advertising.

Um, this is like saying full disk encryption is false advertising, because it doesn't prevent people blowing up your apartment complex. LOL.

Sorry, dude, I cannot resist. No hate to you, we all need to start from somewhere.

This is different from the Wayland security model, as Wayland restricts the ability for clients to modify and read from other clients arbitrarily. This is an extension to a Wayland compositor, and as all extensions do, it contains code which runs on your system. Any code, unless sandboxed, can access your filesystem no matter if it's run under Wayland, X11, or no windowing system at all for that matter.

It is not related to Wayland or the compositor in any way. This is a plasmashell extension.

Similar caveats do apply to KWin scripts and effects though

wayland was not about avoiding applications accessing resources or running scripts (that is why sandboxing is for) but to avoid programs to have access to the rest of the graphical session (things like input devices and other graphical windows and their data)

It does, when the bad actor is a program you run, and other open windows contain sensitive content.

Here the bad actor is code being loaded as an extension to the compositor. A bit like a kernel module, which can bypass file access permissions if it wants.