@Timo Aaltonen: Please review my post and patch again. The patch changes how 
SHMConfig works! The problem with SHMConfig "on" was, that it created a shared 
memory with permission bits set to 0777. I agree with you that this is not 
acceptable, because any (unpriviligized) local user could have written to the 
memory area of a root process, and Illegal values may cause undefined behavior.
My patch resolves this by assigning the memory to a specific, privileged group, 
and setting the permission bits to 0770. Default SHMConfig "on" and default 
SHMGroup "admin" can not cause any trouble this way, because even when the data 
structure is located in a shared memory area, only the root user and users in 
the admin group have access to it. And users in the admin group have already 
root acces (via sudo) by default, so they could become root, and modify the 
particular memory area either way.
Please point it out if I miss something, but I don't see a security issue 
anymore.

It would be also possible to let SHMConfig as it is (and off by
default), and introduce my patch as the  SHMSecureConfig option, which
could be on by default. Shall I rewrite my patch in this way?

Also I would be grateful for any information about the control interface you 
mentioned earlier. Is this the 
static int ControlProc(LocalDevicePtr local, xDeviceCtl * control)
in synaptics.c?

-- 
SHMConfig should be enabled by default, and gsynaptics should be installed by 
default on laptops
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/155937
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