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throwaway_58291

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throwaway_58291
·4년 전·discuss
I take this to mean that you think they are rare, confirming a part of my assessment on the probability of risk.

Since I cannot reply to your other comment, I will respond here. What proportion of Firefox-Linux users do you think are victims of such RCE attacks?
throwaway_58291
·4년 전·discuss
> It's hard to overstate how much of a benefit this is in terms of security for those on Linux.

I assumed you talked about "those on Linux", not "those on Linux who have non-negligible probability of being targeted by hostile nation-states".

It's often difficult to step back and re-evaluate initial claims, and we sometimes choose to use tactics like zooming in on improbable contexts to justify them. But I think it's healthy to face criticism that may snap us out of it, so I'm writing this comment. But it's late now, so I will not be able to follow up anymore.

P.S. I don't have GNOME installed :)
throwaway_58291
·4년 전·discuss
We are talking about users of the Linux operating system. Many of them do know what a VM is. If they don't, or if they expect to be able to run untrusted programs willy nilly, then the benefit of Firefox doing this is, again, basically zero.

As I cannot reply to your reply, I will write the response here. By using Wayland, surely the direct benefit of this change to you is zero...
throwaway_58291
·4년 전·discuss
By the probability of this risk scenario (visit evil.com, be the victim of a successful RCE, with a particular method of privilege escalation that somehow gets all the right details to work) it sure looks to me like you overstated the expected benefit (negative loss).

I do concede that our utility functions may differ, if you actually believe it and not just inflating the importance of this issue.

Also I may have a bias in that I disable JavaScript by default, so the probability of such a risk is much lower. I tried to not make that assumption though, in judging the expected loss.
throwaway_58291
·4년 전·discuss
In the common scenario of a single user, on a single user machine, running programs under his uid, the benefit is basically zero.

If such a user wants to run untrusted programs, he'd use a virtual machine anyway.

So, I think it's very easy to overstate the benefit, and your comment did just that.