by jchw | 2025-12-16 17:36:09+00:00
> Because you do not get it: this is not Android. There is no fixed UIDs.

Uhhh... I didn't say anything about fixed UIDs.

> There is no fixed absolute paths.

There is if your distribution says there is.

> The binaries are not always root-owned.

They are if your distribution says they are.

> There is no central signing authority (thank god!).

I mean, that's not even really 100% true right now. What major distribution doesn't sign packages in some form? Yeah, fine, the binaries themselves lack a signature attached to them, but if they can sign the packages they sure as shit can sign an ELF binary provided a mechanism to do so.

But anyway. There is if your distribution has one.

> You really do not get it: _anything_ you could validate from a PID would be absolutely pointless in desktop Linux.

There is if your distribution makes there a way to validate something from the PID.

The point is that the mechanism would be different per each system, the same way that OpenSuSE may have a MAC in enforcing mode by default and Arch might not. That's how desktop Linux really works. You're not forced into any specific policy, but that doesn't mean policy is pointless. There are plenty of people running Secure Boot and Lockdown mode too, it's not automatically pointless.

Immutable distros exist right now.

> Or, if you are assuming Flatpak, you could simply do not allow access to the session bus and instead allow access only to a filtered bus that only allows talking to whichever services Flatpak provides. Which is how Flatpak does it and you sideline the entire problem of having to authenticate clients on the bus, which is a nightmare. The entire process tree descending from original Flatpak session gets access to this bus and only to this bus.

This doesn't fix anything. Like half of the shit I have installed via Flatpak needs direct session bus access anyways.

> I really do not see the point of this. Of course I want privileged processes to be able to see my passwords; this is _my_ desktop.

Do you know what "principle of least privilege" is? My printer driver is "privileged" but that doesn't mean it needs to be able to capture my screen and read all of my passwords. It would be much better if Linux was capabilities-based. Hey, maybe someone should attempt to implement an RPC framework that does that.

> What you're describing is not another layer of security, it is just pointless complication. As I said, the more I think of it, the less reason I see for a secret service which does not really share secrets.

That's because your thought process is going in one direction and not taking any new input. You've been running the same exact narrative the entire time. Yes it's true that if you assume the system must be watertight-secure under all circumstances in every single existing desktop Linux setup, then it can't be done. But that's irrelevant. The question is could it be used as a primitive to construct a more secure Linux desktop, and the answer is a resounding, "Well, duh".

Again. Immutable distros exist right now. They already start with many of the necessary security properties, you mostly need to find a way to deal with insecure linker behavior.

> You reach stupid conclusions like having to design a key-value DB server that only returns values to the process that inserted them in the first place, like what TFA is doing. Why? Just why??? Have multiple totally separate, private instances! And you already have one storage for that: the app's private storage. Why do you even need IPC for this?

sigh

You do realize that this is how many apps currently use GNOME Keyring, right? They literally use it to store their own passwords for no other purposes. That's literally already a thing. The intent is not so they can share your password across the system, it is to provide a mechanism to securely store data. Sometimes it is also used to share data between different programs, but I don't even think that is most of the time.

Checking my kdewallet, I can see the following applications:

- KRDC

- Remmina

- KRDP

- Chromium

- krfb

- xdg-desktop-portal

... And then the "Passwords" folder, which contains the passwords saved for e.g. SMB shares.

Of those... I think the only one that is ever even accessed by anything else is the Chromium one possibly, for browser migration? The rest are only ever stored for themselves. So yes, the wallet is being used as a dumb key-value store. One that is encrypted automatically without needing the application to do key management.

> Why? You do not put the reason why not. Every application does this _today_, and no IPC has ever been needed for this (e.g. openSSL is a library, not a service).

Not cryptography itself, but key management. Although you can do key management by proxy by providing a cryptography API too, sort of how using the TPM for this purpose works. That is the approach taken by DPAPI on Windows, in contrast to the keyring approach taken on Linux and macOS (where you get a key value store from the app perspective and do neither cryptography nor key management in the app.)

And the "Why?" is very simple. You want a secure key that doesn't get lost. The user already has a password, ergo it already provides a perfectly good passphrase to wrap a key; individual applications can't access that. And that way, the OS can take care of whether user data is encrypted with a TPM or using a passphrase-wrapped key. Having this control centralized could become important if it's ever required by regulation to be handled a certain way.

> This is a circular argument. D-Bus is a mess because it is a mess. Even if I would agree, it is a pointless argument.

It's not circular at all... man, you really need to learn how to read. What I am saying is that it is not only a mess, but deeply flawed. Even if you clean it up, what you will wind up with is an aggressively polished turd. There is no world in which that is logically worth the effort.

> I am answering to a guy that says that D-Bus sucks then proceeds to create an alternative instead of fixing it. I have not only contributed to D-Bus through decades, I am also part of the reason it is used in some commercial deployments outside traditional desktop Linux (or was a decade ago). My opinion is still as important as his, or yours, which is : nothing at all.

Well, it's at least good that you also recognize the value I place in your opinion at this point, so that we can agree on at least one thing.

But honestly outside of being a smarmy dickhead (sorry, but I never have any reservations firing back when someone is doing it to me) the point I'm making is that if you want DBus to get fixed instead, well, good for you. I would like a Threadripper for Christmas, while we're at it. Just don't act like it's weird when someone who is actually doing something about the trainwreck that is the Linux desktop decides to do something else instead given they have no reason to care about the peanut gallery here.

(And it really doesn't matter to me what Windows or macOS does here honestly. I care about the Linux desktop, not how it compares to whatever crapware Microsoft and Apple are pushing. They haven't really meaningfully improved the desktop in the past 10 years anyways.)