Flatpak packages should ask for every permission they need, and the user needs to approve every one of them.
Right now, we have this weird in-between state where some flatpak packages ship with limited permissions (like Bottles). That’s because every permission the package asks for is immediately granted. The user doesn’t get a chance to refuse these requests. This current model serves to make life more difficult for non-malicious flatpak packagers while failing to protect users from malicious packages.
Also, GNOME needs a Flatpak permissions center like KDE. You shouldn’t need to install a third party program to manage permissions.
Absolutely, permissions should be disabled by default, and only when the app needs to do something that requires a certain permission should it ask for it.
Maybe even do something like Android, where permissions automatically get revoked if you don’t use an app for a certain time. I love that feature.
I think it’s enabled by default, but you can also just disable it for specific apps.
But if you leave it enabled and permissions get revoked after a while, you’ll get a notification telling you about it. I think that’s fair.
There’s always going to be a debate on whether something like this should be opt-in or opt-out, but for the purpose of privacy and data security, it makes sense to be on by default, I reckon.
I don’t doubt it, but this is a good place to start.
This claim has interesting phrasing:
Adding X11 sandboxing via a nested X11 server, such as Xpra, would not be difficult, but Flatpak developers refuse to acknowledge this and continue to claim, “X11 is impossible to secure”.
If you look at the GNOME post, you’ll see they haven’t argued against including a nested X server at all:
Now that the basics are working it’s time to start looking at how to create a real sandbox. This is going to require a lot of changes to the Linux stack. For instance, we have to use Wayland instead of X11, because X11 is impossible to secure.
I’m not saying they haven’t refused to acknowledge this elsewhere, but it’s strange to point to this blog post which acknowledges that the sandbox is very much a work-in-progress and agrees with Madaidan that X11 is hard to secure.
Does Xpra provide better sandboxing than XWayland? If not, I think the Flatpak developer’s solution to this is: just use Wayland. And obviously, there’s plenty of room to improve with the permissions Flatpak does offer.
I did some searching on the Flatpak Github for issues and found that you can actually use Xpra with Flatpak, and the answer is “just use Wayland”:
As odd as this may sound, you should not enable (blind) unattended updates of Flatpak packages. If you or a Flatpak frontend (app store) simply executes flatpak update -y, Flatpaks will be automatically granted any new permissions declared upstream without notifying you. Using automatic update with GNOME Software is fine, as it does not automatically update Flatpaks with permission changes and notifies the user instead.
It’s great that GNOME Software notifies you when permissions change! I don’t use Flatpak enough to know, but I hope flatpak update notifies you too if you don’t use the -y option.
I’ve tried to combat this a bit with a global Flatpak override that takes unnecessarily broad permissions away by default, like filesystem=home, but apps could easily circumvent it by requesting permissions for specific subdirectories. This cat-and-mouse game could be fixed by allowing a recursive override, such as nofilesystem=home/*.
But even then, there is still the issue with D-Bus access, which is even more difficult to control …
I think it is sad that Flatpak finally provides the tool to restrict desktop apps in the same way that mobile apps have been restricted for a decade, but the implementation chooses to be insecure by default and only provides limited options to make it secure by default.
I think the main reason why the implementation is insecure by default is simply because when it started most applications did not use portals and many portals we have today did not exist. You had to poke holes in the sandbox to make anything work cause all applications expected to run unconstrained. In the future as more apps become flatpak aware this should stop being an issue.
Not what they did on the surface (limiting source to only customers). That’s allowed by the GPL. But they went beyond that which imo makes them non-compliant.
RH will cancel your access/agreement if you share the GPL’d source with others. That’s directly forbidden by section 6 of the GPLv2. RH is free to cancel your agreement when they want, but not because you exercised your rights under the GPL.
Once your agreement is canceled, you also lose access to the matching source for other GPL’d packages installed on your system. RH could offer other methods to be in compliance, but as far as I know, they have not.
This kind of thing could work for a few apps, say a color picker utility or a QR code generator etc.
Looking at the docs, it isn’t clear if apps can write to their own namespace (instead of writing to user folders directly), but if they can, we could expand the scope to games like supertuxkart, 2048 etc, which would then be able to save user milestones and progress in their own area - a bit like how Android apps do it
It’s a great start IMO, although admittedly there is still work to do. Flatpak atm bridges the gap with allowing new apps, requiring new libs, to run on older stable/LTS distros
Yes, they can. There are app-specific folders in .local that flatpaks can read and write to specifically for this purpose, and also the file picking dialog may give access to the one specific file you picked.
Android IMO has great usability in exposing a database to apps, which means they aren’t required to ship their own database engine.
I remember in 1995-ish or something when I used the internet for the first time using the Netscape browser… And I was asking a friend if he had tried all the web sites yet. Just got a weird look back… :) I didn’t know what the internet was back then at first.
There are portals: docs.flatpak.org/en/…/desktop-integration.html#po… . they allow secure access to many features. Also any flatpak app still has access to a private app-specific filesystem, just not to the host.
Doesn’t work for all applications but for many sand boxing is possible without a loss of features.
No filesystem access for a flatpak app just means it cant read host system files on its own, without user permission. You can still give it files or directories of files through the file explorer for the app to work with, just that it’s much safer since it can only otherwise view files in its sandbox.
[…] aren’t there some folks who want flatpak/snap/appimage to basically replace traditional package managers?
There might be people who think that, but that isn’t realistic. Flatpak is a package manager for user facing apps, mostly gui apps.
The core system apps will still be installed by a system package manager. I.e rpm-ostree on immutable Fedora or transactional-update/zypper on OpenSUSE MicroOS.
Snap can do system apps and user facing apps and fully snap-based Ubuntu might come in the future.
But this won’t force people to use them. Traditional package managers will keep existing for system apps and maintainers will proabably keep their gui packages in the repos.
There’s Obfuscate, an image redactor, and Metadata Cleaner which is self-descriptive. Both works properly without any filesystem access at all, because they use the file picker portal to ask the user for the files to be processed.
So that people can't easily track how much time is spent on getting round window corners compared to how much time is spent not implementing thumbnails in a file chooser dialog?
I, just 10 minutes ago, was looking for an artwork of mine to upload here on lemmy. I gave up. It’s beyond insane to not have a thumb nail option in the browser for a file upload.
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