Security Headlines bubblewrap podcast special
In modern stacks, a large chunk of applications run in container environments
such as docker and systemd-nspawn. However, these applications are not built for security.
The security community has proven it again and again that privilege escalation attacks
are very serious with attacks such as Dirty Cow and CVE-2016-3135.
A way to tackle the problems of running applications with a low privilege user without
that application being able to interact with other running applications is to use user namespaces.
Using user namespaces you can hide process id’s to the applications and provide a more sandboxed environment.
Alex wanted to the distribution of multiplatform applications easy
which led him to sandboxing and namespaces, today he
maintains the “chroot on steroids” project bubblewrap which is a sandbox platform for running
sandboxed applications in different namespaces.
Alex is also a long time user of Linux, with 20 years working for Redhat.
He started to code on the commodore 64 and has been a developer ever since. In school he
got introduced to Solaris and jumped deeper and deeper into Linux rabbit hole.
Working on Linux allows Alex to work from home in the suburbs of Stockholm
and work on programs that get used by a global user base.
In this episode, we talk about how it has been to work on sandboxed
desktop applications and how flatpak has grown.
So far there a has been a handful of different CVE’s for bubblewrap that we talk about.
Flatpak has gotten bigger and bigger and “flathub” has come to see the light , flathub is a place where all Linux users can get sandboxed desktop applications.
More and more developers are publishing their apps on flathub, the
Mozilla team has even picked up on it and are currently shipping firefox throw it.
Flathub is running on a stable Rust backend, Alex picked Rust to be the backend as one of his first larger Rust projects.
We of course talk about how Rust is becoming more part of our daily lives
as more and more applications are being ported to it, like librsvg journey from being written in C to now being a rust code base, as well as libraries
being written in Rust.
If you are maintaining an application with a graphical user interface and you target
an audience that is running Linux on the desktop, we recommend
that you get your application on flathub.
Here is a guide on how you can do that:
https://github.com/flathub/flathub/wiki/App-Submission
This podcast was made possible with running zoom with flatpak:
$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
$ flatpak install flathub us.zoom.Zoom
$ flatpak run us.zoom.Zoom
Listen to it here:
https://anchor.fm/firo-solutions/episodes/Security-Headlines-bubblewrap-podcast-special-eitlb9
External links:
https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap
https://flathub.org/home
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slirp
https://github.com/rootless-containers/slirp4netns
https://podman.io/
https://github.com/GNOME/librsvg
https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/
https://twitter.com/gnomealex
https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/3/9/555
https://lwn.net/Articles/657744/
Sidenote:
Feedspot has crown security headlines as one of its top cybersecurity
podcasts of 2020, and we love them for picking us!
