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Comment by timthelion | Hacker News Reader

To what extent is snap a new package manager and to what extent is it a security mechanism? Does it actually prevent the application from getting full access to the user's home directory?

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It's a new package manager that implements existing linux security mechanisms. It will use apparmor to confine the snap to the directories that it is allowed to read and write. By default, $HOME/snap/snap-name/

Then the snap can use interfaces to go out of its confinement and access things that the user has agreed to allow: https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/wiki/Interfaces

Cool, though it seems to be "insecure by defualt". I presume that there will be some clear way to say "I don't trust this snap, dissable everything like gsettings, pulseaudio microphone support, ect. that I wouldn't want some random untrusted code to access..."

I didn't know that DBUS supported selectively allowing access to selected services. I thought that was a new feature in the non-accepted kdbus. That was certainly what the redhat folks wrote. They wrote that it isn't possible to secure dbus without kdbus...

This works:

> snap disconnect <snap>:<plug>

Then you can reconnect with:

> snap connect <snap>:<plug>

dbus mediation is something that Canonical developers added, IIRC.

I saw it in the docs, but my question was how did they do it when this is a missing feature in DBus... So Canonical added this feature to dbus but it hasn't made its way upstream or redhat chooses to ignore the new feature so that they have a reason to promote kdbus. OK.

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