Its not a secret that I’ve been working on sandboxed desktop applications recently. In fact, I recently gave a talk at devconf.cz about it. However, up until now I’ve mainly been focusing on the bundling and deployment aspects of the problem. I’ve been running applications in their own environment, but having pretty open access to the system.

Now that the basics are working it’s time to start looking at how to create a real sandbox. This is going to require a lot of changes to the Linux stack. For instance, we have to use Wayland instead of X11, because X11 is impossible to secure. We also need to use kdbus to allow desktop integration that is properly filtered at the kernel level.

Recently Wayland has made some pretty big strides though, and we now have working Wayland sessions in Fedora 21. This means we can start testing real sandboxing for simple applications. To get something running I chose to focus on a game, because they require very little interaction with the system. Here is a video I made of Neverball, running in a minimal sandbox:

In this example we’re running a regular build of neverball in an environment which:

Is independent of the host distribution

Has no access to any system or user files other than the ones from the runtime and application itself

Has no access to any hardware devices, other than DRI (for GL rendering)

Has no network access

Can’t see any other processes in the system

Can only get input via Wayland

Can only show graphics via Wayland

Can only output audio via PulseAudio

… plus more sandboxing details

Yet the application is still simple to install and integrates nicely with the desktop. If you want to test it yourself, just follow the instructions on the project page and install org.neverball.Neverball.

Of course, there are still a lot to do here. For instance, PulseAudio doesn’t protect clients from each other, and for more complex applications we need to add new APIs to safely grant access to things like user files and devices. The sandbox details page has a more detailed list of what has to be done.

The road is long, but at least we have now started our journey!