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It's great that UWP apps are sandboxed, but they're a minority of the apps people use. It's not just sandboxing of UWP apps and Windows Sandbox. Recent Windows

It's great that UWP apps are sandboxed, but they're a minority of the apps people use. It's not just sandboxing of UWP apps and Windows Sandbox. Recent Windows 10 version have a feature called 'Controlled folder access' where you can designate certain folders as being protected (besides the Windows system folders). If any non-whitelisted application attempts to access these folders, you get a notification and their access is blocked by default. You can then whitelist the application if you want to grant it access. It's more course-grained than fully sandboxes application, but it's a nice extra layer of defense for application that do not use sandboxing by default with a portal-based mechanism to request access to certain files/folders. There is more information here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-protection/microsoft-defender-atp/controlled-folders https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-pro... (This should be fairly easy to implement in Linux with a MAC framework like AppArmor/SELinux or perhaps eBPF. But it's not useful for most people until someone actually implements this in a user-friendly manner.)

pjmlp 6y ago
Which are some of the ways that Android deviates from GNU/Linux. SELinux, seccomp, eBPF, FORTIFY_SOURCE, HSAN,.... all enabled.
- danieldk 6y ago
  Indeed. Unfortunately it seems nobody in the traditional Linux ecosystem outside Red Hat (and perhaps Canonical's Snap) is really interested in meaningfully improving UI application sandboxing. Flatpak is often met with outright hostility and then some ranting about how OpenBSD's pledge already solves all problems. Sure, Flatpak is not perfect yet and too many Flatpaks still have to use filesystem=home (which usually caused by the application or toolkit not being friendly to sandboxing). But the Flatpak folks at least try to gradually improve security. Disclaimer: I mostly run Linux on the desktop. But application security is definitely a blind spot for the Linux community. Many people still seem to think that UID 0 is the ultimate goal. We are mostly protected by the fact that Linux has ~1% of the desktop and is therefore not an interesting target yet.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    I am fully with you, although I lost hope on the Desktop GNU/Linux, so just end up using it on a surviving travel netbook. However I do use Ubuntu with AppArmor, Snap and whatever else that Canonical is trying to do to improve the situation.

pjmlp 6y ago

Which are some of the ways that Android deviates from GNU/Linux. SELinux, seccomp, eBPF, FORTIFY_SOURCE, HSAN,.... all enabled.

danieldk 6y ago
Indeed. Unfortunately it seems nobody in the traditional Linux ecosystem outside Red Hat (and perhaps Canonical's Snap) is really interested in meaningfully improving UI application sandboxing. Flatpak is often met with outright hostility and then some ranting about how OpenBSD's pledge already solves all problems. Sure, Flatpak is not perfect yet and too many Flatpaks still have to use filesystem=home (which usually caused by the application or toolkit not being friendly to sandboxing). But the Flatpak folks at least try to gradually improve security. Disclaimer: I mostly run Linux on the desktop. But application security is definitely a blind spot for the Linux community. Many people still seem to think that UID 0 is the ultimate goal. We are mostly protected by the fact that Linux has ~1% of the desktop and is therefore not an interesting target yet.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I am fully with you, although I lost hope on the Desktop GNU/Linux, so just end up using it on a surviving travel netbook. However I do use Ubuntu with AppArmor, Snap and whatever else that Canonical is trying to do to improve the situation.