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This is Simon McVittie's software development blog. Main site: ladderVNP安卓版

DebConf 17: Flatpak and Debian
The indoor garden at Collège de Maisonneuve, the DebConf 17 venue
Decorative photo of the indoor garden

I'm currently at DebConf 17 in Montréal, back at DebConf for the first time in 10 years (last time was DebConf 7 in Edinburgh). It's great to put names to faces and meet more of my co-developers in person!

On Monday I gave a talk entitled “A Debian maintainer's guide to Flatpak”, aiming to introduce Debian developers to Flatpak, and show how Flatpak and Debian (and Debian derivatives like SteamOS) can help each other. It seems to have been quite well received, with people generally positive about the idea of using Flatpak to deliver backports and faster-moving leaf packages (games!) onto the stable base platform that Debian is so good at providing.

A video of the talk is available from the Debian Meetings Archive. I've also put up my slides in the DebConf git-annex repository, with some small edits to link to more source code: A Debian maintainer's guide to Flatpak. Source code for the slides is also available from Collabora's git server.

The next step is to take my proof-of-concept for building Flatpak runtimes and apps from Debian and SteamOS packages, flatdeb, get it a bit more production-ready, and perhaps start publishing some sample runtimes from a cron job on a Debian or Collabora server. (By the way, if you downloaded that source right after my talk, please update - I've now pushed some late changes that were necessary to fix the 3D drivers for my OpenArena demo.)

I don't think Debian will be going quite as far as Endless any time soon: as Cosimo outlined in the talk right before mine, they deploy their Debian derivative as an immutable base OS with laddervnp安卓, with all the user-installable modules above that coming from Flatpak. That model is certainly an interesting thing to think about for Debian derivatives, though: at Collabora we work on a lot of appliance-like embedded Debian derivatives, with a lot of flexibility during development but very limited state on deployed systems, and Endless' approach seems a perfect fit for those situations.

[Edited 2017-08-16 to fix the link for the slides, and add links for the video]

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We discussed the possibility of moving towards a model where the daemon uid to be allowed is written in the .service file, together with an opt-in to "modern D-Bus access control" that makes the "firewall" unnecessary; after some flag day when all significant system services follow that pattern, dbus-daemon would even have the option of no longer applying the "firewall" (moving to an allow-by-default model) and just refusing to activate system services that have not opted in to being safe to use without it. However, the "firewall" also protects system bus clients, and services like Avahi that are not bus-activatable, against unintended access, which is harder to solve via that approach; so this is going to take more thought.

For system services' clients that follow the "agent" pattern (BlueZ, polkit, NetworkManager, Geoclue), the correct "firewall" configuration is more complicated. At some point I'll try to write up a best-practice for these.

New header fields for the system bus

At the moment, it's harder than it needs to be to provide non-trivial access control on the system bus, because on receiving a method call, a service has to remember what was in the method call, then call GetConnectionCredentials() to find out who sent it, then only process the actual request when it has the information necessary to do access control.

Allison and I had hoped to resolve this by adding new D-Bus message header fields with the user ID, the LSM label, and other interesting facts for access control. These could be "opt-in" to avoid increasing message sizes for no reason: in particular, it is not typically useful for session services to receive the user ID, because only one user ID is allowed to connect to the session bus anyway.

Unfortunately, the dbus-daemon currently lets unknown fields through without modification. With hindsight this seems an unwise design choice, because header fields are a finite resource (there are 255 possible header fields) and are defined by the D-Bus Specification. The only field that can currently be trusted is the sender's unique name, because the dbus-daemon sets that field, overwriting the value in the original message (if any).

To make it safe to rely on the new fields, we would have to make the dbus-daemon filter out all unknown header fields, and introduce a mechanism for the service to check (during connection to the bus) whether the dbus-daemon is sufficiently new that it does so. If connected to an older dbus-daemon, the service would not be able to rely on the new fields being true, so it would have to ignore the new fields and treat them as unset. The specification is sufficiently vague that making new dbus-daemons filter out unknown header fields is a valid change (it just says that "Header fields with an unknown or unexpected field code must be ignored", without specifying who must ignore them, so having the dbus-daemon delete those fields seems spec-compliant).

This all seemed fine when we discussed it in person; but GDBus already has accessors for arbitrary header fields by numeric ID, and I'm concerned that this might mean it's too easy for a system service to be accidentally insecure: It would be natural (but wrong!) for an implementor to assume that if g_message_get_header (message, G_DBUS_MESSAGE_HEADER_FIELD_SENDER_UID) returned non-NULL, then that was guaranteed to be the correct, valid sender uid. As a result, fd.o #100317 might have to be abandoned. I think more thought is needed on that one.

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As happens at any good meeting, we took the opportunity of high-bandwidth discussion to cover many useful things and several useless ones. Other discussions that I got into during the hackfest included, in no particular order:

More notes are available from the GNOME wiki.

Acknowledgements

The GTK hackfest was organised by GNOME and hosted by Red Hat and Endless. My attendance was sponsored by Collabora. Thanks to all the sponsors and organisers, and the developers and organisations who attended.