Re: Bug#765632: ForwardX11Trusted set to yes over a decade ago, for release reasons?
On Aug 19 2015, Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 11:51:36PM +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
>> On Wed, 2015-08-19 at 20:59 +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
>> > Run xterm and try to select something, bam, your xterm crashes with
>> > BadAccess.
>>
>> Which means that people would typically note quite quickly that they
>> need to open up things more (if they want to continue).
>>
>> In my opinion this is much less worse, than having the current default,
>> where people who may be at risk wouldn't notice anything.
>
> So the result is that each user of X11 forwarding swears at their
> computer for a while until they work out what the problem is, and then
> configure "ForwardX11Trusted no" so that it goes away. I hardly see
> this as a net improvement in the state of the world.
>
> I would welcome comments from people other than Christoph, whose views I
> am already quite familiar with. (And thanks, Josselin.)
Until now, I did not know how much trust I'm actually putting into the
remote server when using -X (on Debian). I'll probably continue to use
it in the majority of cases (because the alternatively seems rather
useless), but in my opinion it would be great if it could be somehow
communicated to the user what -X really implies.
I believe sudo prints an extensive warning on first invocation (and uses
a flag file ~/.sudo_as_admin_successfull to be less verbose after
that) - maybe ssh could do something similar?
Best,
-Nikolaus
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