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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Desktop / Laptop privacy & security of web browsers on Linux part 1: concepts and theory

Web browsers today are everywhere, and they are a huge pile of shit code, full of shiny things that hide sometimes bad surprises, but, despite this fact, you want to use it daily cause of too many things today depend on you to visit a web site often requiring you[r] latest web technologies.

Even if many vendor[s] today take browser security seriously, the fast evolution of web standards make [it] very hard to care about that on such big projects, and almost everyday in the wild appear a new method to fuck poor users using the web as a vector of evil code, using both browser vulnerability or user stupidity innocence.

There is no 100% security, if anyone tell[s] you he has the panacea of all evil things and can show you how to be 100% protected online, it's a liar, no exception. Despite that, something can be done to be at least a little bit more secure and block the most common attack vectors, with a cost in terms of usability that is really cheap.

[Continues...]

There are many tools in the wild to build the sandboxes using the features explained, some more user friendly, other more complex, some more complete, other more specific to one or few features.

After some tests and with the help of many friends from the Veteran Unix Admins group on facebook, the primary tool I've chosen to use is firejail.

Firejail is a great utility aiming to build sandboxes and it match almost perfectly our needs. With just a little bit of shell scripting, a little patch I have sent to firejail and a couple of other tools supported by firejail itself, we have all what is needed for our architecture.

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