While there are technically speaking VM solutions for both x86 and ARM platforms, they are also behave differently and are configured different, from my understanding (but I don’t have a lot of experience with virtualization on ARM so I could also be mistaken). I’d prefer an approach that we can easily use both on the Librem 5 and the Librem laptops.
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@Kyle_Rankin The one quick solution fit all is exactly what firejail is providing. No VM, All security features are implemented directly in Linux kernel. By contrast, Qubes uses a “Type 1” or “bare-metal” hypervisor called Xen
The same hypervisor mentioned in my post about bromium above.
I think firejail is definitely the simplest/uncomplicated way. Currently maintained.
For purism that means much less work and overhead as you only need to provide the preinstalled binary and let users run their apps through it.
When I’ve tested firejail on the Librem 5, it seems to exit without any error output. Even stracing didn’t enlighten me on why. That said, I’m exploring a few options for sandboxing at the moment. The approach I’m leaning most heavily toward right now would involve a combination of bubblewrap backed by apparmor. Apparmor would be re-using existing profiles for an application so even if bubblewrap rules missed something apparmor had, you’d still end up with protection at least as good as apparmor by itself. I think this is important because you don’t want to risk a security regression by using bubblewrap rules that aren’t as advanced as their corresponding apparmor profile.
I’m an app developer, so that’s my viewpoint. I sincerely dislike the imposed restrictions by android and iOS and I usually prefer developing for the web because of a little bit more freedom.
And these ineffective restrictions only hinders what we can do and pasteurizes the whole array of apps that would be possible to be create and only allows for CRUD apps like instagram and whatsapp that captures some input, send to a server and brings data from a server to be displayed.
What has an appeal to me on starting developing linux apps is that I can do anything, no restrictions, so if I want to create something different from a pasteurized app I will be able to.
Are there other approaches to security that do not rely on plastering the app developer?
It seems hypervisors are now available on Android as well.
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