Re:Your Phone Is Your Castle
by dathinab on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @04:56AM
(#24490823)
Mostly what Zak says.
All applications and (preferable system services too) should be sandbox fist. Linux has much sandbox technology but it's often focused on server use-cases, fairly complex and everything but sandbox first (more like non-sandbox first and then we fit the sandbox to make it so that the program doesn't notice it runs in one).
But it's also many many small problems.
Most (all?) of which you can solve by a complex combination of selinux + cgroups + ... + modified applications + ... (long list). But doing so it a lot of work and often ends up with major usability drawbacks.
Just to name one example of a small but terrible feature: LD_PRELOAD.
Sure it's nice for hot-fixes including ad-hoc security hardening but it's generally a horrible idea in a context where you don't fully trust all programs.
Another think is that most programs can read conigs/settings of most other programs or at least know that there are such settings.
And the list goes one.
Again just to be clear you can fix a lot of this by putting things into Linux containers but what is missing is a container engine focused on desktop applications which goes far enough, which also entails you can't just run existing software without at least switching out the GTK/Qt framework with a version adapted for this use-case and potentially needing more adaption then this.
So all technical possible but we are not quite there yet I think, but then I'm not completely sure as I haven't followed some of the underlying topics close enough in the recent years.
All applications and (preferable system services too) should be sandbox fist. Linux has much sandbox technology but it's often focused on server use-cases, fairly complex and everything but sandbox first (more like non-sandbox first and then we fit the sandbox to make it so that the program doesn't notice it runs in one).
But it's also many many small problems.
Most (all?) of which you can solve by a complex combination of selinux + cgroups + ... + modified applications + ... (long list). But doing so it a lot of work and often ends up with major usability drawbacks.
Just to name one example of a small but terrible feature: LD_PRELOAD.
Sure it's nice for hot-fixes including ad-hoc security hardening but it's generally a horrible idea in a context where you don't fully trust all programs.
Another think is that most programs can read conigs/settings of most other programs or at least know that there are such settings.
And the list goes one.
Again just to be clear you can fix a lot of this by putting things into Linux containers but what is missing is a container engine focused on desktop applications which goes far enough, which also entails you can't just run existing software without at least switching out the GTK/Qt framework with a version adapted for this use-case and potentially needing more adaption then this.
So all technical possible but we are not quite there yet I think, but then I'm not completely sure as I haven't followed some of the underlying topics close enough in the recent years.