I expect the Flatpak sandbox to protect my ~/ from getting cluttered by applications, not to protect me from any actually malicious software. The post's premise seems misguided.
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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YES. I don't understand this delusion people keep perpetuating. Flatpak has a MILD form of container sandboxing. For a real security sandbox we have Firejails or Bubble wrap.
Flatpak is, at it's core, a software development and distribution packaging format. NOT a security implementation.
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I always check my flatpak settings post install before running the app and adjust permissions according to need. I mean it does offer more security to me since it's user installed, I can granularly update permissions and control more or less where and what is can touch.
Alternatives to this are SELinux,AppArmour and firejails which are slightly more inconvenient to use.
To me that is mostly secure,or secure enough.
Well and then there's some immutable distros which might help overall.
Edit: paragraphs
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If we admit that then an app store where anyone can create an account and upload software becomes extremely problematic. This is especially true wherein clients autoupgrade very quickly.
Step one. Legit package a popular app Step two. Wait for substantial uptake Step three. Mix in some ad or malware and watch a tens of thousands get instantly owned.
Anybody can become a community packager for Debian, Fedora, etc.
Anyone can't become a packager in 30 seconds in an automated process that they can' t repeat the 47th time they transmit malware.
The process is identical.
You show up with a package. It gets a basic review. You are granted commit access to your package. You can push changes.
There is slightly more oversight in that another mentor often also has commit access but they can’t and don’t review everything.
Yeah, Flatpak was never meant to be a security mechanism. It is a convenient way to add security to userland though.
In addition to own new code, bundled copies of libraries in packages introduces net new attack surface which isn't patched via the regular distribution security patch process. The image decoding lib that allows remote code execution now exists in flatpaks independently from the one in /lib. Every flatpak vendor that contains it has to build and ship their own patched version of it. This is even more valid for any other libraries flatpaks include that don't exist on the system. The most widely used Linux OSes come with security patching processes, expectations and sometimes guarantees. This new attack surface breaks those and the solution is security sandboxing. This approach has been proven in mobile app packaging and distribution systems. Android is a great example where apps are not trusted by default and vulnerable ones rarely cause collateral damage on otherwise up-to-date Android systems. This is an objective problem with the out-of-band distribution model allowed by flatpak and snap or any similar system, whether you care about it or not personally. It's a well understood tradeoff in software development. It has to be addressed as adoption grows or we risk reducing Linux security to the levels of Windows where apps regularly bundle dependencies with no sandboxing whatsoever.
Every Flatpak vendor
So who's that? Flathub and Fedora, the latter of who automate the Flatpak builds from distro packages anyway.
If you're using a smaller distro which is not backed by a huge security team then this is probably an advantage of using Flatpak, not a negative.
Can the Fedora Flatpaks be browsed and downloaded for other distros?
Yes. All Flatpak apps can be used on any distro.
I'm using the Fedora Flatpak Firefox on Debian, because Fedora's Flatpak runtime supports Kerberos authentication, the Flathub runtime doesn't.
All Flatpaks are portable. There is no reason to use their repo usually though as Flathub often has more up to date, featureful, or upstream maintained versions instead.
Yes, I’m using flatpaks.
Yes, I’m trusting flathub. LOL about people repackaging applications. Wait until they find out the Linux distro they use is a collection of software repackaged by 3rd parties. 😂
Userland hasn’t had any concept of security, so it’s nice people are trying to fix it.
I have a handful of applications from Flathub I trust, but that's it.
I don't see Flatpak as a security mechanism and I don't treat it like one.
This is generally good advice. Would you run the program without a sandbox? No? Then you probably shouldn't run it inside a sandbox either.
You can never be sure that the program isn't using a flaw in the sandbox to break out or is just piggybacking onto a whitelisted action that is required for the program's basic functionality.
And if some program requires r/w for your entire home directory and network access then you might as well not use a sandbox in the first place because it can already do everything useful that it needs to do.
There is a subset of only verified apps, if you want to be secure. But then you lack trustworthy unofficial apps like VLC.
flatpak remote-delete flathub ; flatpak remote-add --subset=verified flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
Also until every app uses Portals, and until we have a share portal, most apps are basically unrestricted if you compare it to Android.
Are you using Flatpaks?
Yes, makes Debian desktop perfect. Rock solid base system, all desktop apps updated to the latest and greatest without pollution.
Are you trusting Flathub?
Yes BUT... there should be a way to have / manage / install Flatpaks offline like AppImages and/or easy and officially supported ways of archiving the repository into something useful and easy to use.
Related: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/4874
Do you bother about the sandboxing and security?
Too much security already: https://github.com/flathub/org.keepassxc.KeePassXC/issues/29#issuecomment-559476300 A password manger can't community with a Browser as it is. This makes both useless and kills one of the best use cases for Flatpak.
I would love to install a browser, and a password manager through flatpaks but they won’t talk with each other.
I would get an IDE like visual studio code, through flathub, but it doesn’t talk with the system software I want to develop on.
I would love to get Steam or any other games as flatpaks but having to redownload mesa and other system files just for that uses a lot of space and feels like a second OS.
So yeah, I agree with you. It’s awesome! But it has some flaws right now (that I’m sure they’re being worked on)
Yes but they solve the cross distro packing problem and that's neat. The GNOME Software integration is also amazing, those few times when you see that desktop Linux actually can do it. :P
I just hope for better and easier tools to mange the security / process communication. For me flatpaks are more about finally having a fast and decent way of packing stuff across distros with dependencies than a sandbox / security feature.
I’m not against them, at all. I use them extensively. I just wish I could use them for everything!
flatpak create-usb backs up an app and all dependencies for offline use.
Yes, that works really well and whatnot. Totally reliable way of doing it. :P
Because the flatpak components/dependencies of a program can differ depending on the host (for example if you have an NVIDIA card, it will pull some NVIDIA dependencies), so if you export a program from a non-NVIDIA system to the other, it won't be complete to work reliably on the new system, but the missing parts can be downloaded on the Internet, it's still reducing the bandwidth requirement.
For anyone interested: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/usb-drives.html and https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-01-01-flatpak-export-import.html
Ah Nvidia, very true. I’m not sure a solution can exist for that. Nvidia needs the driver to match the kernel.
- Yes, it's more convenient for some things
- Enough to use it
- Yes and no
Linux security to me has always been, don't download random packages you don't trust.
Even if you have trust. There can be security vulnerabilites in apps we are using. Flatpak seems to not really help in any way.
And this is why I've never taken much of Linuxs user base seriously when they talk about security. Hilariously bad defense strategy.
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No, I have before, but I don't anymore.
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No.
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Yes, I want them. My NixOS configuration is sandboxed (defaults to true anyway). I was happy with using
dnf, but sick of having to use multiple package managers. I also didn't like how contributing to Fedora had a lot of cognitive overhead, so I use NixOS now. One package manager to rule them all. I have access to expressions, I do ocassionally read them, so I trust them. And if there's no apps on Nix, I write expressions and contribute to the repo.
I write expressions and contribute
Is it possible to learn this power?
Irritate the core maintainers and they will teach you just like Mr Miyagi. /s
Honestly, contributing to nixpkgs isn't that hard. You just have to refer other expression files. This guide is probably one of the most well-written guides I've come across.
Just a word of advice, while cloning NixOS/nixpkgs, set --depth to somewhere between 1 to 10. It's a pretty large repository, and you just want to have the last ten git logs at most.
Side note, I wish yesterday me had read this before cloning the full 4 gigs lol
As someone who struggled quite a bit to learn Nix, I'd say start small. Install Nix the package manager on any old distro you're familiar with and play with standalone Home Manager. Enable one program here and there, have it manage your shells and CLI apps, set environment variables and write files. It's something you can immediately see the effects of and feels pretty rewarding, so I think it's a great place to start.
I also happened upon this video series a few days ago and it's a great resource, easy to parse and walks you through not only the basics but how to look around and investigate in the REPL when you want to figure something out.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I'm mostly using Flatpaks on Tumbleweed, I only use the package manager if I can't find a Flatpak version. Reason for that is that with Flatpak I can precisely know what I manually installed, as Tumbleweed lacks a proper easy way of getting a list of user installed packages
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/xtsB38nyKtc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Okey, let me start the discussion.
What's the point of sandboxing or permissions on environment for one user?
It means you can run apps without trusting their developer will full access to your computer and your files.
Just like on mobile, you only allow apps to access what you know they need. Nothing more.
Okey, so why we run apps without trusing developers in the first place? Or why do we even need the trust?
(It's not that I think sandboxing is not useful sometimes, I just want to see if we get somewhere)
Think about service providers (government, banking, messaging, streaming, gaming). To participate in life we might depend on some of their services but don't fully trust these parties. Flatpak is not secure/sandboxed enough to run untrusted apps. Meanwhile on Android the situation looks much better.
Tried couple of times and it didn't work. I had more luck with AppImage. Don't use it, don't want it.
The Flatpak experience on Ubuntu is piss poor on purpose fwiw, Canonical kneecapped Flatpak in favour of Snaps. Try it on Fedora!
AppImages offer zero protection or containerization, it's just a distribution format.
Nope, I'll never use flatpak, appImage, snap, things like this.
If there's no .deb to install, I try to compile it myself.
I HATE org.shit.fuck.