Rated 7.8, this vulnerability is already being addressed by the big software distributions and trickling in for Qubes templates.
When do we expect the dom0/sys-gui update?
Rated 7.8, this vulnerability is already being addressed by the big software distributions and trickling in for Qubes templates.
When do we expect the dom0/sys-gui update?
Does this impact Qubes OS in any meaningful way?
I don’t know how to quantify (or to determine) “meaningful” in this context.
Hence the question.
local privilege escalation in distributions where the X.org server is run with root privileges
it’s been a while since we stopped running X as root. “we” refers to operating systems / distributions in general.
edit: although, it seems X is running as root on Qubes OS >_>
Exactly…
[user@dom0 ~]$ ps -efww | grep [b]in/X
root 4116 4103 1 09:11 tty1 00:02:57 /usr/bin/X -core -noreset :0 -seat seat0 -auth /run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt1 -novtswitch
[user@dom0 ~]$
Applications in VMs cannot talk directly to X server in dom0, especially they cannot craft a request that would trigger this bug. So, Qubes OS as a whole is not affected by this issue.
X server instances in individual VMs may be affected (it would allow application inside a VM to compromise its own X server only). This doesn’t give attacker much, especially since X server in VM is running as normal user, so doesn’t even allow root escalation. Distributions used in VMs will ship fix for this according to their update policy and mechanisms.
Thanks @marmarek !