X Window System authorization
Open-knowledge reference entry
In the X Window System, programs run as X clients, and as such they connect to the X display server, possibly via a computer network. Since the network may be accessible to other users, a method for forbidding access to programs run by users different from the one who is logged in is necessary.
There are five standard access control mechanisms that control whether a client application can connect to an X display server. They can be grouped in three categories:
access based on host
access based on cookie
access based on user
Additionally, like every other network connection, tunneling can be used.
Host-based access
The host-based access method consists in specifying a set of hosts that are authorized to connect to the X display server. This system has inferior security, as it allows every user who has access to such a host to connect to the display. The xhost program and three X Window System core protocol requests are used to activate this mechanism and to display and change the list of authorized hosts. Improper use of xhost can inadvertently give every host on the Internet full access to an X display server.
Cookie-based access
The cookie-based authorization methods are based on choosing a magic cookie (an arbitrary piece of data) and passing it to the X display server when it is started; every client that can prove having knowledge of this cookie is then authorized connecting to the server.
These cookies are created by a separate program and stored in the file .Xauthority in the user's home directory, by default.
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This entry incorporates text from “X Window System authorization” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.