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Comment by saderror256 | Hacker News Reader

What Flatpak also does well wasn't mentioned, which is sandboxing applications (can snap do this as well i think), I use proprietary applications on flatpak sometimes so i can feed them the resources they only need, like discord, it does not need to see my files or my running processes for the running games feature, so i just restrict them with flatpak. Sandboxing is nice for proprietary software basically, or software that collects info or just any software that connects to a server, you can snip out useless stuff you don't need while it still hopefully functions well.

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http://flatkill.org/ claims that “The sandbox is a lie”:

> Almost all popular applications on flathub come with filesystem=host, filesystem=home or device=all permissions, that is, write permissions to the user home directory (and more), this effectively means that all it takes to "escape the sandbox" is echo download_and_execute_evil >> ~/.bashrc. That's it.

> To make matters worse, the users are misled to believe the apps run sandboxed. For all these apps flatpak shows a reassuring "sandbox" icon when installing the app (things do not get much better even when installing in the command line - you need to know flatpak internals to understand the warnings).

I have not used flatpack. Is this description accurate? Also:

> Up until 0.8.7 all it took to get root on the host was to install a flatpak package that contains a suid binary (flatpaks are installed to /var/lib/flatpak on your host system). Again, could this be any easier? A high severity CVE-2017-9780 (CVSS Score 7.2) has indeed been assigned to this vulnerability. Flatpak developers consider this a minor security issue.

The first two are also the case with snap. No packages actually seem to use the sandbox feature.

There was already a post on this. Basically the argument about home is true but this is because 1) apps should not use filesystem access but rather portals (if they can) 2) nothing should be executable in the home folder (nobashrc, no script, etc...)

If I remember well the second argument was about update not being frequent enough.

So nothing fundamentally about Flatpak but more about the infrastructure (lack of updates) and the use of it (we should not allow home access and use Portals or we should disable bashrc).

> nothing should be executable in the home folder

Says who? The purpose of a home directory to contain user-specific files including executables. Developers compile their software and write their scripts in their home directory. Even if we made the absurd decision that no file may be executed from the directory, there are many ways to cause harm by simply editing user-specific configuration files (e.g. in ~/.config).

Arguing that the problem is with executables in $HOME rather than Flatpak is incredibly delusional.

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