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Unless you're going out of your way to run your browser in a container or dedicated VM on Linux, there are substantial risks associated with browsing the web in

Unless you're going out of your way to run your browser in a container or dedicated VM on Linux, there are substantial risks associated with browsing the web in terms of exposing all of your information in /home, which might include ssh and pgp private keys, basically everything your user can access. But we have a number of solutions for running things in containers if you just use them. Early on firejail was popular, these days I just run nspawn containers for browser instances and bind mount in some stuff for a shared Downloads directory etc. I can't speak to how that compares to OSX as I've never used it, but it is worth noting that the security story on Linux can range from bad to somewhat OK depending on your setup. Edit: In responses people seem to be completely ignoring that I already stated above in my original comment that I can't speak to how it compares to OSX. I don't know what OSX is doing for application sandboxing defaults. I can however speak with some authority on the Linux situation. And today, if you're running firefox/chrome as your regular user as installed by apt/yum etc, without any additional sandboxing, and that user has access to secrets like ssh/gpg private keys, you're being unnecessarily reckless. And unfortunately that is basically the default way browsers are run today on most distributions This is a major reason why the Flatpak/GNOME people have been working so hard on portals and namespaces are an integral component of the runtime. It's not just about application distribution. They're trying to close a major security hole in desktop linux as it's often used today. They want applications like the browser run in its own namespaces with just the minimum of host filesystem paths bind mounted in. There's absolutely no reason for your browser process to have the ability to access all of your private keys, just because they happen to be under the home directory it happens to have access to, full stop.

jolmg 7y ago
> substantial risks associated with browsing the web in terms of exposing all of your information in /home, which might include ssh and pgp private keys, basically everything your user can access. What are you talking about? You're saying that a random website is given unrestricted file access to everything the user can access. Can you back that up with a concrete example or a link explaining the issue or something?
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  All it takes is a browser exploit. We've had plenty of browser exploits for any given browser, sandboxing the entire program a la containers is the most effective mitigation outside of running it in a dedicated vm.
  - jolmg 7y ago
    All it takes is a browser exploit, in any OS. What does the possible existence of exploits have to do with macOS being more secure than Linux? macOS can also have exploits. I don't understand where your claim that there's a specific risk of unrestrained file access to websites comes from. In my eyes, saying that it could be true because exploits could exist nullifies everything you said. You could apply that argument to everything: There is a substantial risk in iPhones giving websites unrestrained access to making phone calls on your behalf because all it takes is an exploit.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - newnewpdro 7y ago
      Different OSes have different sandboxing capabilities. Until relatively recently, Linux had effectively none, just chroot, and selinux which almost everyone disabled for a decade. The point, which you seem to be missing, is that with generalized sandboxing tools like containers, you can isolate any application to limit the potential damage of application exploits. It's a form of defense in depth. We must assume browsers have many bugs and are exploitable. Ok, from that perspective, what do we do to safely access untrusted input (the entire internet) with the browser on a computer we also do things like banking, private communications, and access privileged servers from? We run it in either a dedicated VM or more recently, we use sandboxing technologies like containers. I don't understand why this is so difficult for you to grok.
      - jolmg 7y ago
        You keep trying to shift this conversation into sandboxing. Of course, any form of sandboxing is going to add defense in depth to anything. It isn't of any particular relevance to this conversation. You said: > Unless you're going out of your way to run your browser in a container or dedicated VM on Linux, there are substantial risks associated with browsing the web in terms of exposing all of your information in /home, which might include ssh and pgp private keys, basically everything your user can access. You're saying that there's this particular substantial risk in this particular OS, in this particular scenario. When I ask for any details that can back it up, you reply "All it takes is a browser exploit". I would hope it would be self-evident that that is no reason to think that the particular risk you mentioned is real, or at least any more real than it is for any other OS, for any other app, or in any other circumstance. My only interest in the comment was determining if the particular risk is real, but now it seems it was just FUD.
willtim 7y ago
Both Chrome and Firefox have support for sandboxing on Linux. For the security conscious, there's always the Xen/Linux Qubes distribution, which is considerably more secure than MacOS.
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  Yes, Qubes is a good option to providing a dedicated VM per browser instance. Relying on the browser alone for sandboxing is problematic as the dominant browsers can't really be trusted. It's best to sandbox the entire program, in addition to their internal sandboxing techniques.

jolmg 7y ago

> substantial risks associated with browsing the web in terms of exposing all of your information in /home, which might include ssh and pgp private keys, basically everything your user can access. What are you talking about? You're saying that a random website is given unrestricted file access to everything the user can access. Can you back that up with a concrete example or a link explaining the issue or something?

newnewpdro 7y ago
All it takes is a browser exploit. We've had plenty of browser exploits for any given browser, sandboxing the entire program a la containers is the most effective mitigation outside of running it in a dedicated vm.
- jolmg 7y ago
  All it takes is a browser exploit, in any OS. What does the possible existence of exploits have to do with macOS being more secure than Linux? macOS can also have exploits. I don't understand where your claim that there's a specific risk of unrestrained file access to websites comes from. In my eyes, saying that it could be true because exploits could exist nullifies everything you said. You could apply that argument to everything: There is a substantial risk in iPhones giving websites unrestrained access to making phone calls on your behalf because all it takes is an exploit.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - newnewpdro 7y ago
    Different OSes have different sandboxing capabilities. Until relatively recently, Linux had effectively none, just chroot, and selinux which almost everyone disabled for a decade. The point, which you seem to be missing, is that with generalized sandboxing tools like containers, you can isolate any application to limit the potential damage of application exploits. It's a form of defense in depth. We must assume browsers have many bugs and are exploitable. Ok, from that perspective, what do we do to safely access untrusted input (the entire internet) with the browser on a computer we also do things like banking, private communications, and access privileged servers from? We run it in either a dedicated VM or more recently, we use sandboxing technologies like containers. I don't understand why this is so difficult for you to grok.
    - jolmg 7y ago
      You keep trying to shift this conversation into sandboxing. Of course, any form of sandboxing is going to add defense in depth to anything. It isn't of any particular relevance to this conversation. You said: > Unless you're going out of your way to run your browser in a container or dedicated VM on Linux, there are substantial risks associated with browsing the web in terms of exposing all of your information in /home, which might include ssh and pgp private keys, basically everything your user can access. You're saying that there's this particular substantial risk in this particular OS, in this particular scenario. When I ask for any details that can back it up, you reply "All it takes is a browser exploit". I would hope it would be self-evident that that is no reason to think that the particular risk you mentioned is real, or at least any more real than it is for any other OS, for any other app, or in any other circumstance. My only interest in the comment was determining if the particular risk is real, but now it seems it was just FUD.

willtim 7y ago

Both Chrome and Firefox have support for sandboxing on Linux. For the security conscious, there's always the Xen/Linux Qubes distribution, which is considerably more secure than MacOS.

newnewpdro 7y ago
Yes, Qubes is a good option to providing a dedicated VM per browser instance. Relying on the browser alone for sandboxing is problematic as the dominant browsers can't really be trusted. It's best to sandbox the entire program, in addition to their internal sandboxing techniques.