It's not fully sandboxed if it can write to my screen! That filthy app, writing stuff all over the place!
this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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Sandboxes have been converted into quarantine bomb shelters, for child safety
Haskell programmers when you tell them the main function isn't pure
That's why we have Wayland. :)
What if your app actually needs access to the internet?
Or actually do anything useful? No network, no filesystem.. it's a hello world app isn't it..
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.
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There are portals: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/desktop-integration.html#portals . 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.
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.
Portal.
Oh come on, what modern program actually needs to communicate or access the file system?
Exactly all programs should be web based cloud subscription only. We don't want that filthy code on our rgb nvme drives
Lol, sorry no network access either.
Wouldn't want the gaping security hole open that is hypnotizing the user via RGB control.
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Download the internet along with it!
I'm self-hosting the entire internet. I hope you guys are enjoying yourselves.
Thanks for having us on your server... when can I get out again though?
The app can then declare the network permission and it will still be marked as safe.
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I like how the app name is blacked out so as not to dox the flathub app.
Sanboxed from prying eyes, it's completely safe.
Why is it censored lol
It's actually Dippi but I don't want to look like I'm advertising it here
!peepee !< is safe
Likes like Hello World is ready to ship.
With a bit of modifying code to use the color picker and maybe rearranging the workflow to adapt to the new system, apps as advanced as DaVinci Resolve and LibreOffice can have permissions as restrictive as this (the network permission would of course may be needed but it would still be marked as Safe by Flathub).
You can use the file picker API to open the files or folders your app would need to access while having no filesystem permissions at all. You can access the camera, microphone, and GPS without the user devices portal, by simply using the respective portals where the user has the power to allow or deny access to such devices as they wish.
You can record the screen, take a screenshot, and pick a color in the screen by simply calling the proper portals, with the bonus that the user will be able to select if they want the entire screen, a specific window, or a specific area to be recorded/captured and whether the cursor should be shown or not.
Heck, even TeamViewer can be as this restricted without losing any functionality if they use the Screen Cast portal which allows apps to mirror input from a remote device! They would of course need the network permission, but that's still safe.
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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
https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/sandbox-permissions.html
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.
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this sandbox craze is slowly pushing things back to the point where we used cartridges and booted off from them straight to the program. who needs an OS at this point? it's bundled with the app anyway 😆
/s, somewhat
It's nice to see good app security being praised. Sometimes it feels like some people on lemmy (and the fediverse) throw security to the wind.
Like one time I had heard someone over on Mastodon say that they thought that HTTPS was too overused and shouldn't have been everywhere because it makes older apps unable to access sites and also made adblocking just ever so slightly harder.
Which yeah, I love adblockers, but I'm definitely not comfortable with all traffic having to go unencrypted just for it.
But my 1998 Windows CE device that's made obsolete by those meddling modern security practices!
This is useful for proprietary software.
As well as FOSS too. Sandboxing is a security standard that should be followed by every software how open their code may be.
What is this? A solitaire game?
This could well be an advanced video editor or an office suite if they take full advantage of the portals API without losing any functionality. Well, they can have the network permission, it would still be safe anyway.
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