Yeah, un-sandboxed programs can access all your user files. That's why there has been such a large push for sandboxing tech like Flatpak. (In general though, you really shouldn't be running programs you don't trust in anything but a VM.)
What is a program you "trust"? Something you bought online from a curated app store? Those occasionally have trojans as well. Something you downloaded? Well, if it's open source, that's the norm. Something you build from source? Most people wouldn't be able to spot an exploit hidden in the source code.
So.. it's run everything sandboxed by default the recommendation for regular users? Or is it "do not download or buy anything, it's simply not safe"?
And yes. The recommendation is to not just download and run programs you find on the web.
It may be the only think that works, but it's also an unreasonable expectation. In practice, this makes it a non-solution. A security solution must both work and be reasonably doable by most users.
You should not confuse general wording, which is directed to people who read this website (by the fact that it's y'know posted here instead of somewhere else), with advice for the average person.
I agree. My point was that this point isn't important for a discussion on a niche site.
I agree that this is the state of affairs currently, but this could made to work similarly to how it works on Android perhaps, which has generally good UX for this.
Yeah, that is probably the best solution. Most mobile OSes do that by default now anyways. Desktop Linux has Flatpaks and Snaps. Windows has UWP apps. And I think MacOS has its entitlements system IIRC.
If you don't absolutely trust somethibg, you shouldn't allow it to run unrestricted.
If this isn't the default node -- transparent, where end users must do nothing in particular -- I don't see it succeeding though.
If someone's targetting you with a 0-day exploit that can escape VM sandboxing, having your ssh key hijacked is probably one of your lesser problems. :-/
(If someone has a VM-busting 0-day, they're probably using it in a targetted fashion. The wider that kind of thing is used, the quicker it will be noticed, and patched, and made useless.)