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by amelius 1837 days ago
What sandboxing/app-deployment systems does Linux offer today, and which one is the most promising?

Are they secure, and do they offer fine-grained permissions?

4 comments

Sandstorm.io is a sandboxing/app-deployment system that runs on Linux servers, which uses capability-based security and fine-grained permissions. (As a note, it sandboxes individual "grains", which are single-documents/instances, not entire apps.

Of course, Sandstorm is built to present a cloud-like web app interface, not local desktop or mobile apps.

I still think personal servers are the eventual way to go, such that people's mobile devices they carry with them aren't the definitive location of lots of their valuable data.

Firejail is by far the most mature for sandboxing desktop/phone applications.

It's available on Mobian and is shipped with hundreds of profiles for popular applications.

I’m no security researcher but have read one who said that due to it being a setuid program, it can potentially turn a bug in firejail into an exploit with root access.
FlatPak is working on adding support for fine-grained sandboxing, but they're not there yet.