Flatpak Linux App Sandboxing Receives New Feature That Hardens Its Security

The Flatpak open-source GNU/Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework has been updated with a new feature that should harden its security.

Alex Larsson has recently released Flatpak versions 0.9.6 and 0.8.7, which comes about two weeks after their previous point releases to implement a new feature that will avoid creating world-writable directories or setuid files, including in the Flatpak export functionality.

"Previously, if you installed to a system-wide repository, the files created for an application were as specified by the remote repo, but owned by root, which could include problematic permissions like setuid or world-writable," explains Alexander Larsson. "We now never create such problematic files or directories on disk."

Additionally, the Flatpak developers made it possible for all newly created flatpak installations to use a "bare-user-only" mode for the repositories. In other words, users can now install Flatpak apps even if the file syst...