• Research into file-notification attacks on Linux

    From LWN.net@618:250/24 to All on Fri Sep 25 06:40:09 2026

    Sudheendra Raghav Neela, a member of a group of researchers from Graz University of Technology, has announced the
    release of research into file-notification attacks that would allow spying on user activity on Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows. The group has published a paper with
    details on the research as well as a web site
    with demonstrations of the vulnerabilities.

    On Linux, an attacker can use inotifywatch to
    monitor a directory to conduct an inter-keystroke timing attack-even if
    they do not have read access to the files within a directory. The group also discovered a method to conduct a UI-redress
    attack (or "clickjacking" attack) on
    KDE 5 and KDE 6 by monitoring /usr/bin/pkexec to detect when Polkit spawns an authentication
    prompt. An attacker could draw a fake password window on top of the real window to collect a user's credentials.

    Both of these flaws are still present today,
    though the Linux kernel did partially mitigate the issue with a
    fix that was included in the 5.10.248, 5.15.198, 6.1.160, 6.6.120, 6.12.65,
    and 6.18.3 kernels shipped in January. See the web site for more information and
    a mitigation to prevent password-prompt windows from losing focus.

    https://lwn.net/Articles/1096431/
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