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  • Martin Flöser's avatar
    Disallow running KWin/Wayland as root · 267b5a11
    Martin Flöser authored
    Summary:
    KWin is not designed to run as root. It is not hardened enough and
    there is a great risk that applications could attack KWin through
    X11 properties, Wayland protocol requests, etc. to trigger stack or
    heap overflows and execute random code. As clients connected to KWin
    could be remote there is a great risk in running KWin as root. Also
    clients on the same system but started as a different user could
    try to gain more privs by exploiting KWin.
    
    Furthermore KWin is designed to not run as root. It interacts with
    logind to get the devices opened which would require root. Whether
    KWin would work as root at all is questionable.
    
    We cannot guarantee that running KWin as root is secure, thus this
    change disallows running KWin and thus a Wayland session as root.
    
    Reviewers: #kwin, #plasma
    
    Subscribers: kwin
    
    Tags: #kwin
    
    Differential Revision: https://phabricator.kde.org/D13008
    267b5a11