Having recently read through a handful of issues on their forums, they seems to brush aside a lot of things. It's a useful tool but the mod / dev team they have working with the community could use some training.
If you're using a flatpak, that's not actually the case. It would have very restricted access to the point where you even would have to explicitly give it access to user /home.
I „love” such sandboxing defaults. Apps like Docker Desktop also share the whole home by default [1], which is pretty interesting if a big selling point is to keep stuff separated. No idea why node_packages need to have access to my tax returns :). Of course you can change that, but I bet many users keeps the default paths intact.
Yeah, I forgot there’s the intermediate VM level, and user folders are shared there so that folders could be mounted to the individual containers using host paths.
Interesting, I thought I had to turn that on for Obsidian!
The first time I started installing flatpaks I ran into a bit of permission / device isolation trouble and ever since then, I use flatseal after installing an app to make sure it actually has access to things.
I'm not claiming it's a security feature of Obsidian, I'm saying it's a consequence of running a flatpak - and in this situation it could be advantageous for those interested.
I have been using firejail for most of these kind of applications, be it Obsidian, Discord, or the browser I am using. I definitely recommend people start using it.
I feel like I should keep track of all my comments on HN because I remember writing a lengthy comment on firejail more than once. I cannot keep doing this. :D
For user-space, there is usually bubblewrap vs. firejail. I have not personally used bubblewrap, so I cannot comment on that, but firejail is great at what it does.
The last comment was about restricting clipboard access to either X11 or Wayland which is possible with firejail quite easily, so if you want that, you can have that.
So do you configure firejail to give each app their own separate, permanent home directories? Like "firejail --private=/home/user/firejails/discord discord", "firejail --private=/home/user/firejails/chromium chromium", and so on?
FWIW, once you start whitelisting, it will only have access to those directories and files only, so Discord has no access to anything other than its own directory and ${DOWNLOADS}, which I should probably change.
You should check out the default profiles for many programs / apps under directory "/etc/firejail".
[1] You run it via "firejail Discord" or "firejail ./Discord" if you name it "Discord.profile".
I treat LS as a privacy/anti-telemetry/anti-accident tool, not as anti malware.
Obviously it can detect malware if there’s a connection to some weird site, but it’s more like a bonus than a reliable test.
If you need to block FS access, then per app containers or VMs are the way to go. The container/VM sandboxes your files, and Little Snitch can then manage externa connectivity (you might still want to allow connection to some legit domains—-but maybe not github.com as that can be use to upload your data. I meant something like updates.someapp.com)
I believe LS has some protections against this. Never tried them, but there are config related security options, incl. protection against synthetic events. So they definitely put some thought into that.
Is this true on Mac? Usually I am notified when programs request access outside the normal sandboxed or temp folders. Not sure how that works in any detail though.
Unless something has changed, it's worse than that. Plugins have unrestricted access to any file on your machine.
When I brought this up in discord a while back they brushed it aside.