On Sat, 2006-05-13 at 16:18 +0200, Ed White wrote: > It seems XFree people disagree... > [...] > ...and some Linux developers too... > > Alan Cox: What it essentially says is "if you can hack the machine enough to > get the ability to issue raw i/o accesses you can get any other power you > want". Thats always been true. Using SMM to do this seems awfully hard > work.
He said that in reply to you saying: > The big problem is that the attack is possible thanks to the way X > Windows is designed He didn't comment on whether X is flawed or not, but rather that from a Linux perspective this whole issue is a storm in a tea cup. In (distribution default) Linux it is always possible for root to get ring 0 access. Simply because root can load kernel modules. That's what root kits do. Fumbling registers through a hacked X server is a novel but rather complicated way, in comparison. Hence, securing a Linux server has always meant (besides removing X and tons of other crud) to build a kernel that doesn't support loadable modules. Cheers Steffen.
