Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 3293
gnome-terminal allows send events by default
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:50 EDT
Any application that can connect to the X display can send keyboard events to a gnome-terminal. This is a security issue because it allows propigation of a violated machine. If I have windows logged into another machine (even through a secure link such as ssh) or if I have a privaledged shell those may be compromised by someone getting an X connection on my machine and sending commands to the remote system or privaledged shell to create a hole. gnome-terminal should make the capability to recieve allow send events as an preferences item, as in xterm. - |Daryll
This can't really be fixed by default because gnome-terminal also supports (for instance) drag-and-drop which could be spoofed by any other client on the display. It is a hoewever, a decent candidate for a future option; though it might give a false sense of security. Basically, I would consider any display allows untrusted clients access to be unsafe. Consider as a few examples: - Sending fake drag and drop to MC; sending mouse clicks to MC - Emacs - I don't believe it guards against send events: M-x shell... - Any GTK+ program with a file selector that turns on the file operation buttons in the GTK+ file selector can be used to delete files. - Do you use a mail client? Can it do attachments? How about attaching /etc/passwd? - Grabbing portions of your screen as in a screen capture [ There is a document in the X source distribution which details some security considerations between clients on a display, for those interested in this topic ] Note that XFree86 also enables the XTest extension by default and using that a client can, if I'm not mistaken, circumvent the whole send_event field.
The X consortium take on this for 6.4 was very much "Use the Xsecurity extension" not fix the apps. Xsecurity prevents partitioned applications even reading the properties off a terminal let alone typing in it A nice gnome hook for xsecurity might be the right approach Alan
As previously stated, the right solution is to secure the display.