Xkbcat Alternatives

xkbcat reviews and mentions

• Improving Xwayland Window Resizing
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Oct 2024

  > Yes, X11 programs can maliciously keylog each other, but this just isn't a thing that actually happens.

  A simple search leads me to this: https://github.com/anko/xkbcat

  There isn't a real attack using it yet, only because it is a really unprofitable endeavor (considering the marketshare, the ROI must be very low).

  > To actually be safe while installing and running malicious applications you need extensive sandboxing

  FWIW, X11 is unsandboxable unless you run a second X server on top of your current server [0]. Which is fine, but you need to consider that most, if not all sandboxing solutions on Linux that "newbs" use, like Flatpak, do not employ such technique when running sandboxed X11 applications.

  The "security by default" behavior of Wayland limits the possible attack surface a lot, without requiring the end user to understand all the nitty details involved.

  [0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bubblewrap#Sandboxing_X11

• Generals.io – Capture enemy generals to defeat them
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Dec 2023

  Yes, approximately. In X11 at least, the hardware codes are called keycodes, and the human readable names are called keysyms. Example ofuse of the XkbKeycodeToKeysym function in use: https://github.com/anko/xkbcat/blob/8abc3402cb679027a3bd0313...

  Keysyms don't necessarily strictly match "key location"; keyboards are allowed to output whatever codes they want for whatever key they want (see e.g. QMK firmware; often used in custom keyboards to do complex conditional key remapping), but they're relatively consistent between common keys on most keyboards, and consistent on the same keyboard even if you switch keyboard layouts in software, or have some custom firmware which functionality is stateful.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Plans for Wayland and Xorg Server
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Nov 2023

  >I don't know a single person that has ever fallen victim to a virus or malware on linux, and I've been using it almost exclusively for the past 20 years. If it was a threat vector, it clearly wasn't a very big issue.

  So: no true Linux user succumbs to malwares and no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.

  Putting that aside, it doesn't take much effort to find an example of X11 keylogger that requires zero superuser privilege and zero explicit permission granting by the user. Here, the first result from DDGing "x11 keylogger": https://github.com/anko/xkbcat

  It is hard to believe this has not occurred in the wild. If such attack really hasn't occurred before in the Linux world, I would rather use the unpopularity of Linux desktop as my justification.

• I keylogger su linux necessitano il super user?
  2 projects | /r/ItalyInformatica | 8 Nov 2022
• do you run an Anti Virus on your Linux system?
  1 project | /r/linuxmasterrace | 2 Oct 2022

  i think you’re misunderstanding what a virus is or what it is a capable of. sudo (just like every other piece of software) can be exploited, which would allow anything (such as a malicious program) to get root privilege with no user input. there are also plenty of other approaches for viruses to take that wouldn’t require root, like X11 keylogging, and user namespace exploits just to name a few. being selective with what you run with sudo can help a lot don’t get me wrong, but it definitely isn’t some silver bullet. think of it like how windows can get malware without ever running something as administrator

• Tray icons missing
  9 projects | /r/Fedora | 6 Jun 2022
• What are the benefit(s) of using Wayland over Xorg?
  2 projects | /r/kde | 22 Jan 2022

  For now, the focus is getting Wayland on par with Xorg. However, there are a number of infrastructure improvements behind the scenes that make it superior to Xorg. For example, applications can no longer silently capture keystrokes without elevated privileges. Demo.

• Anyone using obs in kde wayland ?
  4 projects | /r/kde | 29 Dec 2021

  It's a bit more complicated than that, but essentially yes, see e.g. xkbcat and some other of the keyloggers linked there.

• There is no noticeable difference between X11 and Wayland
  2 projects | /r/linux | 31 Oct 2021
• Fedora 34 Gnome 40 Wayland vs X11
  4 projects | /r/Fedora | 7 May 2021

  Here's a keylogger i found while googling: https://github.com/anko/xkbcat

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