FOSDEM

The original design of the X Window system treated all application as 'friends'. Applications (i.e.) X clients had access to data, state information and resources of each other. Many use cases don't allow such a policy. In environments where the protection of confidentiality matters this behavior is undesirable.

The first attempt to overcome this was the X-Security extension. It presented a fixed and rather simplistic security policy. It had proven itself to be unflexible and not useful.

Here we present a framework to add security policies which meet the needs of the specific environment and use case in place.