XDG-App Continues Maturing For GNOME App Sandboxing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: XDG-App Continues Maturing For GNOME App Sandboxing

The past few months have been very busy for Alexander Larsson and other GNOME developers leading the charge on XDG-App, their approach for sandboxing desktop applications...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XDG-App-Christmas-2015

[jonnor]

xdg-app is a cross-desktop solution, not only for GNOME. And most of the benefits are available without kdbus, so it does not 'depend on it'.

[karolherbst]

xdg-app is a cross-desktop solution, only for GNOME.

seriously?

[MoonMoon]

And most of the benefits are available without kdbus, so it does not 'depend on it'.

The sandboxing is done with a set of technologies, including:

• cgroups
• namespaces
• selinux
• kdbus
• wayland (because X11 is inherently insecure)

In particular, kdbus is very important as it allows us to have an efficient very expressive IPC mechanism with access-validation by the kernel.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps

Can't wait for the first people in this thread complaining that this is Linux-only technology.

[jonnor]

seriously?

Sorry, was supposed to say *not* only for GNOME... Fixed now.

[pal666]

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps

Can't wait for the first people in this thread complaining that this is Linux-only technology.

sandboxing is optional for xdg-app

[alexl42]

kdbus is not necessary for xdg-app sandboxing, we have a user-space dbus filtering mechanism. It introduces another level of indirection for dbus, so a kernel bus would be nice though.

But yeah, it uses other things that are definately linux-only.

[jntesteves]

kdbus is not necessary for xdg-app sandboxing, we have a user-space dbus filtering mechanism. It introduces another level of indirection for dbus, so a kernel bus would be nice though.

But yeah, it uses other things that are definately linux-only.

Hi alexl42, I want to say thank you very much for the great work you've been doing for Linux.
Did you really just create an account only to answer the wining complainers that hang out in these forums?

[alexl42]

Hi alexl42, I want to say thank you very much for the great work you've been doing for Linux.
Did you really just create an account only to answer the wining complainers that hang out in these forums?

Thanks.

Yeah, I have high hopes for kdbus, but it seems it'll be a while before it will be there, so I just want to ensure xdg-app doesn't get struck with the idea that it has to wait for kdbus before its useful. So, need to take care of the whiners...