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Flatpak – a security nightmare – 2 years later (2020)


Flatpak - a security nightmare

Almost all popular apps on Flathub still come with filesystem=host or filesystem=home permissions, in other words, write access to the user home directory(and more) so all it takes to escape the sandbox is trivial echo download_and_execute_evil >> ~/.bashrc. The most popular applications on Flathub still suffer from this - Gimp, VSCodium, PyCharm, Octave, Inkscape, Audacity, VLC are still not sandboxed. The first unpatched vulnerable dependency I found in the offical runtime is ffmpeg in version 4.2.1 with no security patches backported, CVE-2020-12284.

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