The alternative, which is Linux, is to grant your calculator app the permissions to read and write to the same resources that your browser uses to store the password for your bank.

Well "grant" is too strong of a word. "By default and there is nothing you can do about it unless you are exceptionally skilled" is more accurate.

Also your calculator app can read your sudo password as you type it, which you do a dozen times a day to carry out complex and security sensitive tasks such as "Connect to printer to print out mom's recipe for brownies" and "restart bluetooth because it's buggy and you want to listen to spotify on your wireless headphones".

> Also your calculator app can read your sudo password as you type it

True with X11. Fixed in Wayland.

Wayland fixed one problem, but there's no shortage of local privilege escalation bugs with which the calculator can still read the sudo password.

I want to learn more. Do you have some examples?

Just yesterday, Microsoft found a few[0]. There's no shortage of these, but more important is the haphazard way fixes are backported to longterm (e.g. [1]). This reached the point that Google's security advice is 'always follow the latest kernel'[2], except most users and distros simply cannot afford it, so they are stuck with a vulnerable system.

Linux is not unique here. In the longterm, all the typical desktop OSs will need significant structural changes far beyond 'chase vulnerabilities and patch everything all the time'.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/27/microsoft-linux-vulne...

[1] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-15902

[2] https://security.googleblog.com/2021/08/linux-kernel-securit...

Which is still not the standard - probably will take at least a decade before we can even talk about this issue being fixed.

standard or not, it's already shipping by default in ubuntu and fedora except for when nvidia drivers are involved.

The problems will be worked out.. one way or the other.

Oh, I agree. I'm just noting that access controls are useless in a culture that ignores them. I think that goes for the original topic of SELinux.

That's really an app store problem.

Nothing says that Google couldn't prioritize applications that need the least permissions, or make it easy to filter by permissions, or even have an acceptance policy that said "A calculator app can't look into your contacts".

The system could favor the user in this regard, Google just doesn't want it to.

That is quite an exaggeration. My calculator app has requested 0 permissions. That's right, none.

Even though I use the calculator app from a famous ad company that loves gathering data - Google.