Desktop Linux distributions, including Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, Gentoo, all suffer from a complete neglect of basic security principles.

This is totally heterodox to the average Linux enthusiast dogma. Everyone knows that Windows is insecure, right? Linux is open source™, everyone can look at the code and fix bugs, right?

On Security

Really, exploits are just programs written to take advantage of a bug. To minimize exploits, we minimize bugs.

Software bugs come from complexity. The software stacks that make up our software necessarily come with layers upon layers of complexity: they solve hard problems, and require a lot of code to do so. TCP and SSL, for instance, are highly complex protocols that require a team effort of engineers to implement correctly.

It is rather reasonable to expect that all our software will have bugs. The idea of formally verifying everything is a pipe dream, mostly because formal verification is slow and costly.

It’s no suprise that the server world has, with containers and deployment frameworks like Kubernetes, totally embraced the concept of a sandbox. The logic goes—if we can’t ensure our software is secure, we will separate it and quarantine its side effects from the rest of the system.

App level sandboxing

Let’s take an example of Chrome’s browser. The GUI, HTML renderer, V8 JavaScript engine, browser extensions—all these parts of Chrome individually are heaping behemoths of code. So, all these components are separated and live in different operating system processes, and can only speak to each other via an IPC mechanism.

This way, a rogue website isn’t able to access your home directory, since only the GUI part of Chrome has access. The GUI (officially called the Browser process), is the only part that has access to your home directory. So, the Renderer is “Sandboxed”.

This doesn’t mean you’re totally safe though. No sandbox is perfect, and all it takes is a bug in the separation mechanism for infected code to escape into the rest of the system. If the attacker has figured out how to exploit the HTML Renderer, they can try to use the IPC mechanism to exploit the GUI. This is called an exploit chain.

This is super common, and all modern exploits involve long chains of exploits, one after another. You can read about an Android full exploit chain that mimics the above scenario almost exactly.

Game over

In the case that a Renderer exploit and GUI exploit are chained together, you now have a rogue process that can do whatever it likes as your user. This is game over.

It can install a keylogger, record your screen, quietly listen for you to type in your root password, and pop a root shell.

At this point, the attacker can even proceed to exploit the kernel, hack into the firmware, and brick your device, or install a permanent backdoor.

At least, this is what it was like 10 years ago. To prevent exploitation from being so easy, most modern desktop operating systems implement their own sandbox, and separate the entire Chrome app from the rest of the system. This way, extra effort is needed to create a doomsday scenario.

Proper Sandboxing

A modern “Linux distribution” that actually does sandboxing incredibly well is ChromeOS. There are a whole bible of strategies that ChromeOS implements to keep Chrome in it’s own little world. Among the strategies involve cgroups, namespacing, seccomp, etc… This technologies basically do what Docker does (corrected). Chrome cannot see your files unless you give it explicit permission to do so, nor can it execute other programs, or wipe your hard drive.

Not only is Chrome sandboxed—every important system process is sandboxed in ChromeOS. The system logger, the display server, the wifi daemon… A lot of architecting has gone into minimizing the attack surface of these various services by giving them the least amount of privilege possible to do their job. This is the principle of least privilege.

Each process has it’s view of the filestystem stripped away to the bare minimum it needs to execute. It cannot make new network requests unless authorized. It cannot access Linux device nodes like /dev/sda. It cannot access other processes information, as it runs as PID 1 in it’s own process tree. It can’t even allocate more memory than it’s allowed to.

Of course sandboxing isn’t everything—there are a ton of different mitigations and additional details. Mitigations are mostly useful for memory unsafe languages like C and C++, making it more difficult for an attacker to develop an exploit for any given bug.

MacOS, OpenBSD, and even Windows have all made serious progress in sandboxing. ChromeOS has the best, simply because it is the newest, has been designed securely from the start, and doesn’t allow unvirtualized user software.

Improper Sandboxing

Remember the doomsday scenario I discussed above, where a rogue Chrome process can take over the whole system? From 10 years ago? The modern Linux desktop is still right here today.

Here, we find every other desktop Linux distribution. Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, Gentoo, have zero meaningful system level sandboxing.

Generally what happens here, is that distros don’t implement any sandboxing. They leave it up to the user to configure and put security policies in place, so by default, if you install chromium, you are getting zero additional sandboxing beyond the default Chromium settings. Contrary to ChromeOS, Chrome can see all your personal files without explicit permission to do so.

It’s not the maintainers’s fault. Maintainers simply don’t know enough about dependencies and what resources a service needs access to. Meanwhile, developers don’t know the contexts in which their software is being run, and need to release portable programs. Developers therefore can’t assume what permissions their program will need with the rest of the system.

Also, Linux desktop software has a very all-or-nothing approach to permissions. Root, or user. You want to install packages? sudo apt, sudo dnf, sudo pacman will serve you just right. There’s really no reason why a system upgrade requires root privileges, especially for installing user software. NixOS explores this concept, albeit with an utterly incomprehensible configuration format.

Overuse of sudo really deteriorates the separation between root and user, usually to zero, since it’s not hard to install a keylogger, even on Wayland.

Potential improvements

Popular approaches to the Linux sandboxing problem are all lacking.

Flatpak forgets about the problem of system sandboxing. Even if you use these technologies, the base distribution of software that makes up the core OS still is completely unsandboxed, and there are many criticisms against Flatpak’s viablility as a security container in the first place.

Although I have no idea of the quality of implementation, systemd service files support a bunch of namespacing and sandboxing flags declaratively. No Linux distribution actually seriously uses them very much, and it certainly isn’t as comprehensive as ChromeOS’s minijail.

Firejail runs as root and has paved the way for privilege escalation bugs.

Pipewire was a good solution to the Linux audio problem that theoretically allows for better sandboxing via a capability oriented design. It helps pave the work for proper sandboxing to be possible in the future.

New Distribution?

It’s interesting to consider a Linux distribution that fixes these problems. I’ve thought a little bit about a secure linux desktop. But alas, what a waste of time that would be, right?