Chris Siebenmann over on his personal web page at the University of Toronto writes about X networking. He points out two main shortcomings preventing realization of the original vision of network transparancy. One is network speed and latency. The other is a too narrow scope for X's communication facilities.
X's network transparency was not designed as 'it will run xterm well'; originally it was to be something that should let you run almost everything remotely, providing a full environment. Even apart from the practical issues covered in Daniel Stone's slide presentation [warning for PDF], it's clear that it's been years since X could deliver a real first class environment over the network. You cannot operate with X over the network in the same way that you do locally. Trying to do so is painful and involves many things that either don't work at all or perform so badly that you don't want to use them.
Remote display protocols remain useful, but it's time to admit another way will have to be found. What's the latest word on Wayland or Mir?
Source : X's network transparency has wound up mostly being a failure
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @12:39PM (3 children)
Good thing you are not, then. As if we need MORE attack surface for virii and trojans to exploit.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by TheRaven on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:12PM (2 children)
Right, because that's a much lower attack surface than X already has, where any code that runs as the current user can intercept all events and can run any arbitrary code on the GPU and can snoop on the contents of all existing windows.
You basically have two choices: run code on the display server, or accept that remote display is going to suck on any network with nontrivial latency.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:36PM (1 child)
https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/Security/ [x.org]
And never assume that if you do not know about something, no one else does.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday February 11 2018, @10:40AM
sudo mod me up