49
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
49 points (75.3% liked)
Linux
48334 readers
657 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
In addition to own new code, bundled copies of libraries in packages introduces net new attack surface which isn't patched via the regular distribution security patch process. The image decoding lib that allows remote code execution now exists in flatpaks independently from the one in /lib. Every flatpak vendor that contains it has to build and ship their own patched version of it. This is even more valid for any other libraries flatpaks include that don't exist on the system. The most widely used Linux OSes come with security patching processes, expectations and sometimes guarantees. This new attack surface breaks those and the solution is security sandboxing. This approach has been proven in mobile app packaging and distribution systems. Android is a great example where apps are not trusted by default and vulnerable ones rarely cause collateral damage on otherwise up-to-date Android systems. This is an objective problem with the out-of-band distribution model allowed by flatpak and snap or any similar system, whether you care about it or not personally. It's a well understood tradeoff in software development. It has to be addressed as adoption grows or we risk reducing Linux security to the levels of Windows where apps regularly bundle dependencies with no sandboxing whatsoever.
So who's that? Flathub and Fedora, the latter of who automate the Flatpak builds from distro packages anyway.
If you're using a smaller distro which is not backed by a huge security team then this is probably an advantage of using Flatpak, not a negative.
Can the Fedora Flatpaks be browsed and downloaded for other distros?
Yes. All Flatpak apps can be used on any distro.
I'm using the Fedora Flatpak Firefox on Debian, because Fedora's Flatpak runtime supports Kerberos authentication, the Flathub runtime doesn't.
All Flatpaks are portable. There is no reason to use their repo usually though as Flathub often has more up to date, featureful, or upstream maintained versions instead.