Hi,
Yawning Angel:
On Sat, 27 May 2017 12:27:21 +0200 intrigeri intrigeri@boum.org wrote:
With Micah Lee's Tor Browser Launcher (TBL) on Linux with AppArmor enabled, this is not a problem: the sandboxing is done by the kernel and thus different confinement rules can be (and actually are) applied to the Firefox and Tor processes.
Quickly skimming the firefox profile included in TBL, does `network tcp,` do what I think it does?
It does: TBL wasn't converted to using Unix sockets yet. Besides, the network filtering AppArmor support relies on kernel patches that haven't made their way upstream yet, so currently only Ubuntu and OpenSUSE (I think) would block network access if `network tcp,' was removed. So indeed AppArmor is currently not 100% enough for the kind of sandboxing we're looking for. Sorry I forgot that part in my last post!
The differences in approaches, IMO, is totally irrelevant to "does there need to be fundamental architectural changes" since: […]
Agreed on all that.
After reading this thread, it seems to me that both architectural issues need to be fixed anyway on the long term, regardless of TBL. And once they are, having TBL (or similar) in common Linux distros will be a great way to provide a good (and perhaps safe enough?) sandboxed-TB user experience on Debian, Ubuntu, Mint and their derivatives. And as a bonus, TBL verifies the initial download of TB better than what most users are able to do.
FWIW, `sandboxed-tor-browser` folds in a lot of the functionality of `tor-browser-launcher`[1], because the only sane way to bolt on a meta process based sandbox was to have it also manage installation/updating.
Great.
Honestly, I don't see a reason for `tor-browser-launcher` to exist at all in the brave new meta-process launcher based world.
I think the only current good reason to keep it around is that it's already packaged for some common distros, has users there, and nobody looked at packaging sandboxed-tor-browser for them yet.
If the new launcher can handle installation/updates (as IMO, it should), then package the new launcher.
Absolutely. This will address the UX/security problems I was referring to wrt. the "download an app via a tarball and then double-click it" model on Linux.
So I'm glad we decided *not* to have TBL included in the upcoming new Debian release (Stretch), albeit for unrelated reasons.
If people want to continue to use AppArmor, then the meta-process launcher package can include the necessary AppArmor profiles.
I'll be glad to work on this once the long-term plans are clearer :)
Cheers,