Security

📦 That new package smell We’ve all been there: you see a shiny new app on GitHub and you want to “unwrap” it immediately. But in the traditional Linux world, opening a package often feels like opening a box of glitter in your living room—before you know it, dependencies are scattered everywhere, and you’re still finding weird library versions in /usr/lib three months later. This is why I’ve started reaching for the Flatpak. It’s like an unboxing experience where the box stays a box. You get all the “goodies” inside, but the mess stays contained. Let’s see what happens when we tear off the shrink-wrap. ...

👋 Intro If you have ever spent time hardening Linux applications, you probably know the frustration of the all-or-nothing permission model. In the standard Linux environment, once a process starts running, it usually has far more filesystem access than it actually needs. While we have tools like seccomp, chroot, or heavy-duty modules like SELinux and AppArmor, they often feel too complex for simple, application-level sandboxing. Landlock changes this. Since its merge into the Linux kernel in version 5.13, it has become a game-changer for developers. It allows a process to restrict itself without requiring root privileges, moving security away from global system policies and directly into your application code. ...

🔐 Intro As an experienced sysadmin, you might be familiar with the traditional “all-or-nothing” approach: if a shell or process is running with UID==0, it can do almost everything on a system; while a plain user process is restricted by some means: tipically it can’t open RAW sockets, can’t bind “privileged” ports under 1024, can’t change a file ownership and so on. Linux capabilities is a feature, gradually introduced starting from kernel 2.2, that permits a more fine-grained control over privileged operations, breaking the traditional binary root/non-root distinction. Just as by using sudo we can run specific commands as another user (even root), without permanently becoming that user, by using capabilities, we can grant a program only certain privileges without having to run it as root. ...