<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
@Martin Peres: Your ideas are nice in theory, but as Sebastian Wick
already said, it is just not practical.<br>
<br>
If you want a specific example, I have one:<br>
<a href="https://github.com/MaartenBaert/ssr">https://github.com/MaartenBaert/ssr</a><br>
The sole purpose of this application is to record the screen (i.e.
take 30 screenshots per second). People are using this - the latest
version has been installed about 13.000 times on Ubuntu alone (and
that number is still growing). I know that's not a lot in the big
picture, but clearly it is not an 'extremely rare case'.<br>
<br>
I really want to add Wayland support to this application. In fact
that's why I'm here, discussing an API to authenticate my program so
I can actually start to think about adding Wayland support. Your
answer seems to be that the user should continuously hold down a
button on their keyboard in order to record their screen. That's
just not acceptable. I will simply have to tell users to disable the
security features in Weston completely so they can use my
application - and most of them will probably have no problem with
that, because the average user doesn't care about security,
especially when it is something trivial like the ability to take
screenshots. Seriously - a rogue application can <a
href="https://github.com/MaartenBaert/wayland-keylogger">install a
keylogger</a>, steal my saved passwords and browser cookies, ssh
and pgp keys, delete all my files and even my backups, but luckily
it can't take screenshots! I do not want to tell users to disable
security features, but if these features make it completely
impossible for an application to function, then I have no choice.<br>
<br>
It seems like your proposed solution is to take away all control
from the user for their own good, and that is just not going to
work. Any security feature that stops the user from doing something
he/she wants will be disabled by the user.<br>
<br>
The Wayland compositor will never be able to anticipate all possible
use cases and allow only those while blocking all other uses, You
can't block all possible malicious use cases without also blocking a
significant number of normal use cases. You cannot design a secure
desktop that is fully idiot-proof and still usable. You have to
assume that the administrator knew what he was doing when he
installed application X, and trust that application to do what the
user wants.<br>
<br>
Maarten Baert<br>
</body>
</html>