Hi, On Fri, 2015-09-11 at 11:30 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote: > The thing to realize is that Fedora has no interest in *preventing* > users from installing arbitrary software on their system. What we > have > an interest in is preventing users from being *tricked* into > installing such software. Right. Agreed. > What xdg-app allows is to make it plausible to greatly *extend* the > set of software - to allow displaying results that are not built by > Fedora. > > It can't be a complete wild west - there have to be mechanisms for > reporting abuse, blacklisting apps, etc - but we can very viably > allow > people to download and run applications built by 3rd parties, without > making every such app downloaded be able to do *absolutely anything > on > the system* as is the case now. Yes, you're right. Populating the software center is a clear goal that sandboxed xdg-apps allow us to accomplish. So I'm wrong, and they are worth pursuing, regardless of whether they protect against malicious apps that are distributed outside the software center. > For applications built in Fedora - moving them to xdg-apps provides > incremental benefits, such as having a security vulnerability in an > application be localized to that applications - so there's an > incentive > to work in this direction. > > But there's no point in just blanking kicking out all existing > applications in Fedora out of Software unless they are packaged as > xdg- > apps - that doesn't benefit the user. Yes, I agree, good point. Well, there is still one problem here: I expect it's actually quite easy to get malicious software into Fedora, which is a rather huge hole in this plan. So we do want to make sure that we're incrementally moving towards having more sandboxed xdg-apps. We might do that by grandfathering in existing packages, and saying new packages must be sandboxed, but we don't have to. Eventually the goal should be to minimize the set of unsandboxed software we distribute to the bare minimum (probably core apps), but we don't have to achieve that overnight, or even anytime soon, to get real benefits from the technology. > We might want to eliminate the behavior where, currently, you can > click on an RPM link and the RPM is opened by GNOME Software. Or at > least the ability to override the default rejection of unsigned > packages by entering an admin password. > > But that doesn't mean that we're preventing people from installing > such RPMS and taking the control out of the system out of the people > using the system. We should think harder about how to protect against malicious apps distributed outside the software center. If Software doesn't allow installing RPMs anymore, the bad guys are just going to trick users into using the terminal to do so. It doesn't help that non-malicious developers instruct users to install their apps using the terminal.... Michael -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
