KDE Plasma 5.5 On Wayland Is Secure, But Not Yet Ideal

Martin Gräßlin has written a new blog post about the state of security when using KWin/Plasma atop Wayland.

The short story is that using Plasma 5.5 on Wayland is more secure than under X11/X.Org. However, with the 5.5 release it hasn't yet delivered on all its security promises, but that will hopefully be ironed out for KDE Plasma 5.6.

Martin wrote in today's blog post, "So for Plasma 5.5 I think there is nothing we can do to get this secure, which is fine given that the Wayland session is still under development. For Plasma 5.6 we need to rethink the approach completely and that might involve changing the startup overall. We need to have a secure and controlled startup process. Only once KWin is started we can think about sourcing env variables from user locations...Overall it means that Plasma 5.5 on Wayland is not yet able to provide the security I would have liked to have, but it’s still a huge improvement over X11."

KDE Plasma 5.5 is expected for release next month while its currently out in beta for those who want to try it out right now.