Firejail is a SUID sandbox program that reduces the risk of security breaches by restricting the running environment of untrusted applications using Linux namespaces, seccomp-bpf and Linux capabilities. It allows a process and all its descendants to have their own private view of the globally shared kernel resources, such as the network stack, process table, mount table. Firejail can work in a SELinux or AppArmor environment, and it is integrated with Linux Control Groups.
Written in C with virtually no dependencies, the software runs on any Linux computer with a 3.x kernel version or newer. It can sandbox any type of processes: servers, graphical applications, and even user login sessions. The software includes sandbox profiles for a number of more common Linux programs, such as Mozilla Firefox, Chromium, VLC, Transmission etc.
The sandbox is lightweight, the overhead is low. There are no complicated configuration files to edit, no socket connections open, no daemons running in the background. All security features are implemented directly in Linux kernel and available on any Linux computer. To start the sandbox, prefix your command with “firejail”:
$ firejail firefox # starting Mozilla Firefox
$ firejail transmission-gtk # starting Transmission BitTorrent
$ firejail vlc # starting VideoLAN Client
$ sudo firejail /etc/init.d/nginx start
Project webpage: https://firejail.wordpress.com/
Download and Installation: https://firejail.wordpress.com/download-2/
Features: https://firejail.wordpress.com/features-3/
Documentation: https://firejail.wordpress.com/documentation-2/
FAQ: https://firejail.wordpress.com/support/frequently-asked-questions/
AppImage (https://appimage.org/) is a distribution-agnostic packaging format. The package is a regular ISO file containing all binaries, libraries and resources necessary for the program to run.
We introduce in this release support for sandboxing AppImage applications. Example:
$ firejail --appimage krita-3.0-x86_64.appimage
All Firejail sandboxing options should be available. A private home directory:
$ firejail --appimage --private krita-3.0-x86_64.appimage
or some basic X11 sandboxing:
$ firejail --appimage --net=none --x11 krita-3.0-x86_64.appimage
Major software applications distributing AppImage packages:
- Krita: https://krita.org/download/krita-desktop/
- OpenShot: https://www.openshot.org/download/
- Scribus: https://www.scribus.net/downloads/unstable-branch/
- MuseScore: https://musescore.org/en/download
More packages build by AppImage developer Simon Peter: https://bintray.com/probono/AppImages
AppImage project home: https://github.com/probonopd/AppImageKit
AUDIT
Audit feature allows the user to point out gaps in security profiles.
The implementation replaces the program to be sandboxed with a test
program. By default, we use faudit program distributed with Firejail. A
custom test program can also be supplied by the user. Examples:
Running the default audit program:
$ firejail --audit transmission-gtk
Running a custom audit program:
$ firejail --audit=~/sandbox-test transmission-gtk
In the examples above, the sandbox configures transmission-gtk profile
and starts the test program. The real program, transmission-gtk, will
not be started.
Limitations: audit feature is not implemented for --x11 commands.
BitTorrent: deluge, qbittorrent, rtorrent, transmission-gtk, transmission-qt, uget-gtk
File transfer: filezilla
Media: vlc, mpv, gnome-mplayer
Office: evince, gthumb, fbreader, pix
Gitter, gThumb, mpv, Franz messenger, LibreOffice, pix, audacity, strings, xz, xzdec, gzip, cpio, less