<story><title>The Linux Security Circus: On GUI Isolation (2011)</title><url>http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2011/04/linux-security-circus-on-gui-isolation.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jszymborski</author><text>Am I wrong in thinking that this is sort of like worrying about leaving the kettle-on while you&amp;#x27;re falling from a skyscraper?&lt;p&gt;Sure, if you have a rogue application on your computer, it can access the GUI of a program whose security is critical (e.g: a password manager), but even if all the GUI were isolated, you&amp;#x27;ve still got a rogue program on your comp.&lt;p&gt;All the security posts I&amp;#x27;ve ever read have pretty much told me that once you&amp;#x27;re running a malicious program, then it&amp;#x27;s game over, your system is owned by your adversary and the only good way to move on is to wipe the drives, and start fresh. Why then worry about GUI isolation? If the GUI is isolated, a rogue program can presumably uninstall your secure GUI server and replace it with another!&lt;p&gt;This blog mentions Qubes, which is cool and does mitigate the rogue program from what I understand, but anything short of isolating whole applications from each other at the hypervisor-level, is fussing about the wrong thing IMHO.&lt;p&gt;Then again, I&amp;#x27;m not a security professional, so what I&amp;#x27;ve said is likely all wrong...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Houshalter</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s not really true. Tremendous effort has gone into making sandboxed programs. Otherwise any website that has JavaScript could take over your computer. The browser is basically a functioning sandboxed operating system.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s no reason that can&amp;#x27;t be true of actual OSes. All programs could be sandboxed by default. But they just were designed under the assumption that all app makers would be good and no one would ever download and run malicious programs. Yeah, right.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Linux Security Circus: On GUI Isolation (2011)</title><url>http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2011/04/linux-security-circus-on-gui-isolation.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jszymborski</author><text>Am I wrong in thinking that this is sort of like worrying about leaving the kettle-on while you&amp;#x27;re falling from a skyscraper?&lt;p&gt;Sure, if you have a rogue application on your computer, it can access the GUI of a program whose security is critical (e.g: a password manager), but even if all the GUI were isolated, you&amp;#x27;ve still got a rogue program on your comp.&lt;p&gt;All the security posts I&amp;#x27;ve ever read have pretty much told me that once you&amp;#x27;re running a malicious program, then it&amp;#x27;s game over, your system is owned by your adversary and the only good way to move on is to wipe the drives, and start fresh. Why then worry about GUI isolation? If the GUI is isolated, a rogue program can presumably uninstall your secure GUI server and replace it with another!&lt;p&gt;This blog mentions Qubes, which is cool and does mitigate the rogue program from what I understand, but anything short of isolating whole applications from each other at the hypervisor-level, is fussing about the wrong thing IMHO.&lt;p&gt;Then again, I&amp;#x27;m not a security professional, so what I&amp;#x27;ve said is likely all wrong...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nickpsecurity</author><text>It depends on the nature of the attack and the attacker. Most attacks are rehashes of what black hats made available that are easy to counter with patches, a good configuration, or even sandboxing. Targeted attacks hit specific weaknesses in applications. Aside from detection, you can try to use tech to remove classes of weakness or (simpler) attempt to isolate each program giving it just enough privileges to do the job. Programs accepting input from untrusted, isolated programs check that input for sanity&amp;#x2F;security. They raise an alarm if something is wrong.&lt;p&gt;QubesOS is in that category. It&amp;#x27;s technically called a Multiple Single Levels (MSL) of security system. The isolation tries to keep problems in each VM.</text></comment>