Diffusion KWin 267b5a11222e

Disallow running KWin/Wayland as root

Authored by graesslin on May 20 2018, 7:45 PM.

Description

Disallow running KWin/Wayland as root

Summary:
KWin is not designed to run as root. It is not hardened enough and
there is a great risk that applications could attack KWin through
X11 properties, Wayland protocol requests, etc. to trigger stack or
heap overflows and execute random code. As clients connected to KWin
could be remote there is a great risk in running KWin as root. Also
clients on the same system but started as a different user could
try to gain more privs by exploiting KWin.

Furthermore KWin is designed to not run as root. It interacts with
logind to get the devices opened which would require root. Whether
KWin would work as root at all is questionable.

We cannot guarantee that running KWin as root is secure, thus this
change disallows running KWin and thus a Wayland session as root.

Reviewers: KWin, Plasma

Subscribers: kwin

Tags: KWin

Differential Revision: https://phabricator.kde.org/D13008

Details

Committed
graesslinMay 20 2018, 7:51 PM
Differential Revision
D13008: Disallow running KWin/Wayland as root
Parents
R108:b19c3c1c8e52: Drop no longer needed cast to Client in TabGroup related code
Branches
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Tags
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