Secure from whom? I was asked after my recent post questioning the positioning of Mir/Wayland as security improvement.
Excellent question — I am glad you asked! Let us take a look at the whos and compare.
To take advantage of the X11 protocol issues, you need to be able to speak X11 to the server. Assuming you haven’t misconfigured something (ssh or your file permissions) so other users’ software can talk to your
server, that means causing you to run evil X11 protocol code like XEvilTeddy. Who can do that? Well, there are probably a few thousand people who can. That is a lot, but most of application developers or maintainers who have to sneak the changes in via source form. That is possible, but it is slow, has high risk of discovery, and has problems with deniability. And choosing X11 as a mechanism is just plain silly. Just contact a command-and-control server and download the evil payload instead. There are also a smaller number of people who can attack via binaries, either because distributions take binaries directly from them or because the can change and re-sign binary packages. That would mean your entire distribution is compromised and choosing the X11 attack is really silly again.
Now, let us look at the who of a side-channel attack. This requires the ability to run code on your machine,
but it does not have to be code that can speak X11 to your X server equivalent. It can be sand-boxed code such as javascript even when the sand-box is functioning as designed. Who can do that? Well, anyone who controls a web server you visit; plus any adserver network used by such web servers; plus anyone buying ads from such adserver networks. In short, just about anyone. And tracking the origin of such code created by an evil advertiser would be extremely hard.
So to summarize: attacking the X11 protocol is possible by a relatively small group of people who have much better methods available to them; attacking via side-channel can be done by a much wider group who probably do not have better methods. The former threat is so small as to be irrelevant in the face of the second.
Look, it is not that I think of security in black and white terms. I do not. But if improved security is your motivation then looking at a Linux laptop and deciding that pouring man-decades into a partial replacement for the X server is what needs doing is a bad engineering decision when there are so many more important concerns, i.e., you are doing it wrong. And selling said partial X server replacement as a security improvement is at best misleading and uninformed.
On the other hand, if you are working on Mir/Wayland because that kind of thing floats your boat, then fine. But please do not scream “security!” when you break, say, my colour picker.