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Keyboard spyware?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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On Wayland, they probably still can. Wayland's core protocol doesn't allow it, but extensions to enable things like global hotkeys can almost certainly be used for shenanigans.
Also, if the keylogger is running under your user account, it can insert crafted
.desktopfiles wrapping around your apps,ptraceyour apps, you name it. Sandboxing as in Flatpak can stop this sort of thing, but if you run an app outside such a sandbox, and it's malicious, game over.But does it work without prompting the user?
Also, I'm not too familiar with how it works, but afaik global hotkeys on KDE are implemented by the display server/compositor/whatever it's called itself, and not sourced out to a different program.
Well, that's an interesting point, I haven't thought about that.
Right, but they're configured by an unprivileged program: the settings app. Presumably, a keylogger can pretend to be the settings app.
Couldn't the display server check if the app is actually the settings app by looking at it's executable's location? Not sure how reliable that is, but if it is, it could check if it is coming from somewhere in
/usrthat is also not writable by the current user.The display server has no way of verifying the process ID on the other end of the Unix-domain socket connection, and therefore cannot verify the executable image. It also cannot verify that the settings app hasn't had any malicious code injected with
ptrace,LD_PRELOAD, or the like, since the injected code can remove any traces of that before connecting to the display server.