Larsson: The flatpak security model – part 1: The basics

On his blog, Alexander Larsson begins a description of flatpak security. "Long story short, flatpak uses bubblewrap to create a filesystem namespace for the sandbox. This starts out with a tmpfs as the root filesystem, and in this we bind-mount read-only copies of the runtime on /usr and the application data on /app. Then we mount various system things like a minimal /dev, our own instance of /proc and symlinks into /usr from /lib and /bin. We also enable all the available namespaces so that the sandbox cannot see other processes/users or access the network. On top of this we use seccomp to filter out syscalls that are risky. For instance ptrace, perf, and recursive use of namespaces, as well as weird network families like DECnet. In order for the application to be able to write data anywhere we bind mount $HOME/.var/app/$APPID/ into the sandbox, but this is the only persistent writable location."

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