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Comment by conception

3 months ago

It means that someone just has to compromise bubblewrap instead of the other vectors.

This is such a defeatist perspective. You could say this about anything ad nauseum. I think bubblewrap (or firejail) is less likely to be a successful target.

While this may be true, this is still a major improvement, no?

i.e. it seems far more likely that a rapidly evolving hot new project will be targeted vs. something more stable and explicitly security focused like bubblewrap.

Am I getting bubblewrap somewhere other than my distro? What makes it different from any other executable that comes from there?

  • Nothing. Does your threat model assume 100% trust in your distro? I understand saying you trust it a lot more than the garbage on npm. But if your trust is anything less than 100%, you are balancing risk and benefit.

Not "instead", it's "in addition to". Your classical defense-in-depth.

  • No, "instead". If they compromise bubblewrap to send out your files, and you run bubblewrap anyway for any reason, you're still compromised.

    But obviously you can probably safely pin bubblewrap to a given version, and you don't need to "install packages through it", which is the main weakness of package managers

    • Bubblewrap uses the same Linux functions that billion dollar cloud infrastructure use. Bubblewrap does no sandboxing/restrictions itself, it's instructing the kernel to do it.

    • How? bubblewrap isn't something someone has randomly uploaded to npm, it has well known maintainers and a well organised release process (including package signing). Which is easier to do: upload a package to npm and get people to use it, or spend 2+ years trying to become a maintainer of bubblewrap or one of its dependencies to compromise it.

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sure but surely one gets bubblewrap from their distro, and you have to trust your distro anyway.