Firejail – A Security Sandbox for Mozilla Firefox, Part 3

In August, Mozilla was notified by security researcher Cody Crews that a malicious advertisement on a Russian news site was exploiting a vulnerability in Firefox’s PDF Viewer. The exploit payload searched for sensitive files on users’ local filesystem, and reportedly uploaded them to a server in Ukraine.

I am proud to say Firejail users were protected! The default Firejail configuration blocked access to .ssh, .gnupg and .filezilla in all directories present under /home, while more advanced configurations blocked everything else.

The main focus of Firejail project is GUI application sandboxing, with web browsers being one of the main targets. I will describe some of the new features available in Firejail, and how to use them to sandbox a web browser such as Mozilla Firefox.

A short note before we start. By default, Firefox browser uses a single process to handle multiple windows. When you start the browser, if another Firefox process is already running, the existing process opens a new tab or a new window. Make sure Firefox is not already running when you start it in Firejail sandbox.

Firejail – A Security Sandbox for Mozilla Firefox, Part 2

In part 2 of this series, we look at some new browser sandboxing developments in Firejail security sandbox. Since the first article was published, many new features have been added. Unlike other sandboxes, the main focus of Firejail project is GUI application sandboxing, with web browsers being, at least for the immediate future, the main target.

Default profiles

Default profiles are stored in /etc/firejail and they describe the sandboxing environment for specific applications. In the latest versions of Firejail, the default profiles are applied automatically unless a different profile is requested by the user. Start it as firejail appname. Examples:

$ firejail firefox
$ firejail chromium
$ firejail midori
$ firejail opera

The sandbox consists of a mount namespace built on top of the current filesystem, with most directories marked read only, several empty system directories, and a manicured home directory. Linux capabilities filters and seccomp-bpf filters are also enabled. You can always check the current profile by running the sandbox with –debug option:

Firejail – A Security Sandbox for Mozilla Firefox, Part 1

We often find ourselves running applications we received in binary format. These include not only traditional software installed on our computers, but also unauthenticated programs received over the network and run in web browsers. Most of the time these applications are too complex to be bug-free, or can come from an adversary trying to get access to our system.

Firejail is a SUID sandbox program that reduces the risk of security breaches by restricting the running environment of untrusted applications. The core technology behind Firejail is Linux Namespaces, a virtualization technology available in Linux kernel. 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, IPC space.

Introducing Firejail

The software is written in C and only needs libc and POSIX threads (libpthreads), available by default on any Linux platform. Firejail is included in Ubuntu 15.10 and Debian testing. For other distributions, the download page provides:

• source code (./configure && make && sudo make install)
• .deb packages for Debian/Ubuntu/Mint (dpkg -i firejail.deb)
• .rpm packages for OpenSUSE/Fedora/Centos7(rpm -i firejail.rpm)

An Arch Linux package is available in AUR.

Mozilla Firefox

The command to start Firefox in a Firejail sandbox is:

$ firejail firefox
or
$ firejail --debug firefox

Firefox browser running in a Firejail sandbox

Firejail 0.9.10 Release Announcement

We are happy to announce the release of Firejail version 0.9.10. Firejail is a generic Linux namespaces security sandbox, capable of running graphic interface programs as well as server programs. The new release brings in several sandbox management capabilities and a number of bugfixes:

Firejail 0.9.8 Release Announcement

We are happy to announce the release of Firejail version 0.9.8. Firejail is a generic Linux namespaces security sandbox, capable of running graphic interface programs as well as server programs. The new release brings in several bugfixes, a number of new security feature, and new monitoring capabilities:

Securing a Web Server Using a Linux Namespaces Sandbox

The goal of this article is to isolate a small public web server on a simulated demilitarized zone (DMZ) network, and to restrict the local network access in case the server is breached. It is an extra security layer added to an existing home server setup.

Internal DMZ network setup

The DMZ consists of an internal network 10.10.20.0/24 connected to br0 bridge device. On this network I place a Linux namespaces security sandbox at 10.10.20.10, running a web server. In case an intruder gets control of the web server, he will be running with low privileges as a generic www-data user. The host firewall configuration will not allow him to open connections anywhere outside DMZ network.

How to Restrict a Login Shell Using Linux Namespaces

Firejail is a SUID sandbox program that reduces the risk of security breaches by restricting the running environment of untrusted applications using Linux namespaces. 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.

Started as a simple sandbox for Mozilla Firefox, Firejail was expanded to work on any type of executable, such as servers, graphic programs, and even as login shell.

The program is written in C and only needs libc and POSIX threads (libpthreads), available by default on any Linux platform. The download page provides source code (./configure && make && sudo make install), deb (dpkg -i firejail.deb) and rpm (rpm -i firejail.rpm) packages. Once installed, you can start a program in sandbox as:

$ firejail [options] program and arguments
Example:
$ firejail --debug firefox

Default sandbox

To login into a Firejail sandbox, you need to set /usr/bin/firejail as user shell in /etc/passwd. You can change the shell for an existing user with chsh command:

# chsh --shell /usr/bin/firejail

Another option is to define the shell when the user account is created:

# adduser --shell /usr/bin/firejail username

Below is a ssh login session into a sandboxed account:

SSH login into a default Firejail sandbox

Debian Virtualization: Back to the Basics, part 3

The traditional Linux security model starts with file permissions. The model lets the kernel decide whether or not a process may access a resource based on permissions set as part of the filesystem. The coarse-grained granularity of this model often causes Linux processes to have too many rights. If more granularity is needed, one has to resort to adding security related code into the program source.

This series of articles is about Linux namespaces, a lightweight virtualization technology implemented in Linux kernel. In part 1 I’ve talked about building chroot jails using mount namespace, and in part 2 I’ve looked into isolating processes using PID namespace. The next step is to isolate the TCP/IP networking stack using network namespaces.

Security at this level is always reactive. Assuming the bad guy breaks into your server, he will realize he doesn’t have root privileges (classic Unix privilege separation implemented in server software), he runs on top of a fake filesystem (chroot), and he cannot get outside on the network. The later is usually done by placing the computer in a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) behind a firewall.

The same effect can be achieved on the cheap using Linux namespaces. For this, I place the server in a container (vm1) running its own network segment (10.10.20.0/24). The container is connected to the host through a Linux bridge interface (br0). On the host I configure iptables firewall, isolating the server and effectively limiting the potential damage that could be inflicted on the larger network. The final setup looks like this:

Network setup

Debian Virtualization: Back to the Basics, part 2

Linux ptrace() system call provides a means by which one process may observe and control the execution of another process. It is primarily used to implement breakpoint debugging with gdb and system call tracing with strace. In this article I will look at the security implications of ptrace, and how to overcome them using Linux PID namespaces.

Public enemy numero uno

This is an experiment every Linux enthusiast should try. Start an ssh connection in a terminal and stop when you are just about to enter the password:

Starting an ssh session

Open another terminal, find the pid of your ssh session (ps ax | grep ssh) and start strace on it (strace -p 3660). Then, go back to your ssh terminal, type in your password, and watch it flying across strace terminal:

ptrace usage example

Debian Virtualization: Back to the Basics

Namespace isolation is the simplest virtualization technology available in Linux kernel. 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. This feature is mostly popularized and promoted by utilities such as LXC (Linux Containers), Docker and virtenv.

Three syscalls are used to create Linux namespaces, unshare(), clone() and setns(). In this article I will take a look at unshare() and show how to use it directly in your scripts and programs without going through LXC or any other higher level virtualization tool.

I’ll start by investigating unshare command available in util-linux package, and from there I’ll move to the system call. In the end I’ll build a small C program that isolates a web browser such as Mozilla Firefox into a kernel namespace.