Cut / paste fail and crash in multilevel environment

[Dave Walker - Labelled Security Limited]

Hiya folks,

I've been having an interesting issue with the free version of vncviewer (well, the version bundled with Solaris 10, anyway...), and am wondering whether there's a fix in the commercial version. What I'm seeing is 100% reproducible, and goes like this:

In a labelled zone on Solaris 10 Trusted Extensions - classic sparse-root zone, with /usr/bin/vncviewer mounted readonly over loopback:

* open a session onto a VNC server (I'm using the one built into Fedora 15 for this, although it's not exclusively a Fedora problem; Ubuntu 10.10 exhibits it too)

I get the usual start-up details:

# vncviewer 10.0.1.2:0

VNC Viewer Free Edition 4.1.3 for X - built Dec 3 2008 23:03:17
Copyright (C) 2002-2008 RealVNC Ltd
See http://www.realvnc.com for information on VNC.

Wed Aug 17 21:49:03 2011
   CConn:		connected to host 10.0.1.2 port 5900
   Connection:	Server supports RFB protocol version 3.7
   Connection:	Using RFB protocol version 3.7

Wed Aug 17 21:49:08 2011
    TXImage:		Using default colormap and visual, TrueColor, depth 24.
    CConn:		Using pixel format depth 6 (8bpp) rgb222
    CConn:		Using ZRLE encoding
    CConn:		Throughput 20270 kbit/s - changing to hextile encoding
    CConn:		Throughput 20270 kbit/s - changing to full colour
    CConn: 		Using pixel format depth 24 (32bpp) little-endian rgb888
    CConn:		Using hextile encoding

* now, open a terminal in the session, type something, highlight it, put it in the copy buffer

* move pointer out of the window showing the VNC session, the window closes and the following error pops up in the terminal used to launch vncviewer:

X Error of failed request:	BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)
    Major opcode of failed request:	18 (X_ChangeProperty)
    Resource id in failed request:	0x400001
    Serial number of failed request:	20318
    Current serial number in output stream:	23019

Any ideas? I wonder whether "something unconventional" may be happening in terms of vncviewer having its own cut / paste system rather than the one provided by the X server; does cut / paste work OK between different VNC sessions on a non label-aware system?

Cheers,

--
Dave Walker
Labelled Security Limited
Tel: +44 780 3079264
Twitter: @labeledsecurity
http://www.labelledsecurity.co.uk/

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