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[$] X clients and byte swapping
Wednesday January 25, 2023. 10:22 PM , from LWN.net
While there are still systems with both byte orders,
little-endian has largely 'won' the battle at this point since the vast majority of today's systems store data with the least-significant byte first (at the lowest address). But when the X11 protocol was developed in the 1980s, there were lots of systems of each byte order, so the X protocol allowed either order and the server (display side) would swap the bytes to its byte order as needed. Over time, the code for swapping data in the messages, which was written in a more-trusting era, has bit-rotted so that it is now a largely untested attack surface that is nearly always unused. Peter Hutterer has been doing some work to stop using that code by default, both in upstream X.org code and in downstream Fedora.
https://lwn.net/Articles/921196/
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