Skip to content

Security: containers/bubblewrap

SECURITY.md

Security and Disclosure Information Policy for the bubblewrap Project

The bubblewrap Project follows the Security and Disclosure Information Policy for the Containers Projects.

System security

bubblewrap is not a security boundary between the user and the OS, because anything bubblewrap could do, a malicious user could equally well do by writing their own tool equivalent to bubblewrap.

Older versions of bubblewrap were optionally setuid root. This is a system security risk. See https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap/blob/v0.11.2/SECURITY.md#system-security for discussion of this historical configuration. Newer versions of bubblewrap refuse to operate if the binary has been made setuid.

Sandbox security

bubblewrap is a toolkit for constructing sandbox environments. bubblewrap is not a complete, ready-made sandbox with a specific security policy.

Some of bubblewrap's use-cases want a security boundary between the sandbox and the real system; other use-cases want the ability to change the layout of the filesystem for processes inside the sandbox, but do not aim to be a security boundary. As a result, the level of protection between the sandboxed processes and the host system is entirely determined by the arguments passed to bubblewrap.

Whatever program constructs the command-line arguments for bubblewrap (often a larger framework like Flatpak, libgnome-desktop, sandwine or an ad-hoc script) is responsible for defining its own security model, and choosing appropriate bubblewrap command-line arguments to implement that security model.

For example, CVE-2017-5226 (in which a Flatpak app could send input to a parent terminal using the TIOCSTI ioctl) is considered to be a Flatpak vulnerability, not a bubblewrap vulnerability.

Learn more about advisories related to containers/bubblewrap in the GitHub Advisory Database