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Antivirus recomendations
(programming.dev)
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There's plenty of good advice in other comments in this topic. Let me add mine too, something I haven't seen in other comments: You need to figure out your threat model, and steer your course accordingly.
Who do you trust?
What risky activities are you doing?
I have a simple Bash script that restricts apps' view of my filesystem, and cuts off as much stuff as possible, while retaining the app's ability to run. Works with Wayland and console apps, optionally with Xorg apps if I set a flag. Network access requires its own flag.
I could share my Bubblewrapping script, if there's interest.
Thanks for the helpful list. I had concerns in the past about flatpak, because as far as I know the dependencies are bundled into the flatpak and are not using the latest version of your distro. But that means that some flatpaks probably use outdated and unsecure dependencies.
Whats your opinion on that matter?
I found flatpak to in fact be ahead of distros' packages. Granted, I use distros that are rather conservative on update (Debian, Gentoo, and Linux Mint). If you use something bleeding edge like Arch, things may be different, but shouldn't be far off.
Either way, I find flatpak to be reliable.
Indeed, Flatpak is its own repo. It might be more, or it might be less up to date than your favorite distro. Debian, for instance, was once notorious for packaging ancient versions (tho this has improved lately).
The saving grace of Flatpak is that it's still better isolated.
If native Chrome decides to start emitting your crypto wallet's privkeys as a part of its push for Better Customer Experience and More Precisely Targeted Ads, you won't even know or notice it. This is technically very easy to do. It might make itself hard to dislodge by injecting itself into ~/.bashrc or the desktop environment's startup system, or Systemd services.
If Flatpakked Chrome starts misbehaving, it might mine crypto on your CPU (wasting your electricity), or rent out all your disk space, or turn your PC into a node in a botnet, but it won't have access to read or write anything other than your ~/Downloads. It's also easy to uninstall, as it hasn't had a chance to spread its seed.
Sorry for the long rant... What was the original question again? Outdated dependencies? Not an expert, but I hear the whole reason AppImage, Snap, FlatPak, Yarn locks and Go language was invented was to make it easier to have outdated dependencies. You never know what's available in $Distribution, you depend on goodwill of maintainers of $Distribution to package your app and all deps. In AUR you can find older versions of Lua libs (lua51-filesystem) which someone had to add to make Mudlet run - Mudlet didn't see fit to upgrade to the latest Lua.
While it is indeed somewhat true that a library (that many apps depend on) can be patched to fix a security issue, and apps won't need to be rebuilt, it only works if the lib was a sufficiently recent version. And if the distro maintainer is more diligent than the Flatpak maintainer. Otherwise, the authors of said lib are going to ask you to upgrade to a supported version where that bug has already been fixed, defenestrating the whole argument-in-favor. This completely breaks down in NixOS, too, where your package would get rebuilt from source as inputs changed.
Wow really helpful
I would actually like to see your Bubblewrap script if you wouldn't mind sharing. I've been thinking about trying to learn how to use it for a while now, but I've kept putting it off since getting Xorg programs to work with it seemed difficult/confusing to me.
Here it comes: https://paste.ee/p/voTFI
Note that I'm no Bash expert, and you'll undoubtedly find ways to improve or fix it. Usage:
isolate bash
- and then verify your access to filesystem is restrictedX=1 isolate mindustry
NET=1 isolate curl https://ip6.me/api/
NAME=mindustry isolate bash
NAME=mygame isolate ls; cp installer.sh ~/.local/share/bubblewrap/mygame/; NAME=mygame isolate bash
do not use browsers from flatpak. browsers have their own built in sandbox that is crippled or sometimes fully disabled in order to make flatpaks sandboxing work, which are often less restrictive than the browser's.
flatpak is better than nothing for the average user but most packages completely ignore the sandboxing it is supposed to use and require manual changes on flatseal.
Interesting, could you please elaborate?
I had a look at flatpaks I have installed:
Firefox (org.mozilla.firefox): no access to ~
Thunderbird (org.mozilla.Thunderbird): no access to ~
Element (im.riot.Riot): no access to ~
Beyond All Reason (info.beyondallreason.bar) - no access to ~
Steam (com.valvesoftware.Steam) - no access to ~, and (best of all) Steam runs a ton of untrusted code in games, which will inherit this restriction.
Wolfenstein: Blade of Agony (com.realm667.Wolfenstein_Blade_of_Agony) - no access to ~
Chromium (com.github.Eloston.UngoogledChromium): allows access to ~ by default. It's one click to disable, or I could shop around for another one, like org.chromium.Chromium.
OpenTTD (org.openttd.OpenTTD) - allows access to ~
Thus, yeah, some apps neglect to restrrict ~, thankfully it's easy to fix. It's not a disadvantage, though, it's a lack of advantage.