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this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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What really needs to happen:
Flatpak packages should ask for every permission they need, and the user needs to approve every one of them.
Right now, we have this weird in-between state where some flatpak packages ship with limited permissions (like Bottles). That's because every permission the package asks for is immediately granted. The user doesn't get a chance to refuse these requests. This current model serves to make life more difficult for non-malicious flatpak packagers while failing to protect users from malicious packages.
Also, GNOME needs a Flatpak permissions center like KDE. You shouldn't need to install a third party program to manage permissions.
I've tried to combat this a bit with a global Flatpak override that takes unnecessarily broad permissions away by default, like
filesystem=home, but apps could easily circumvent it by requesting permissions for specific subdirectories. This cat-and-mouse game could be fixed by allowing a recursive override, such asnofilesystem=home/*.But even then, there is still the issue with D-Bus access, which is even more difficult to control ...
I think it is sad that Flatpak finally provides the tool to restrict desktop apps in the same way that mobile apps have been restricted for a decade, but the implementation chooses to be insecure by default and only provides limited options to make it secure by default.
I think the main reason why the implementation is insecure by default is simply because when it started most applications did not use portals and many portals we have today did not exist. You had to poke holes in the sandbox to make anything work cause all applications expected to run unconstrained. In the future as more apps become flatpak aware this should stop being an issue.