Thursday, November 9, 2017

Linux sandboxing improvements in Firefox 57

Firefox 57 not only ships a large amount of performance improvements and a UI refresh, it also contains a number of technological improvements under the hood. One of these is that the security sandbox was tightened, making it harder for attackers - should they find a security hole in Firefox in the first place - to escalate that attack against the rest of the system, or your data.

The content process - that is the one that renders the web pages from the internet and executes JavaScript - is now blocked from reading large parts of the filesystem, with some exceptions for libraries, configuration information, themes and fonts. Notably, it is no longer possible to read private information in the home directory or the Firefox user profile, even if Firefox were to be compromised.

We could not block the web content rendering entirely from reading the filesystem because Firefox still uses GTK directly - we draw webpage HTML widgets using the same theming as the native desktop. Rather than postpone the security improvements till this is reworked, we've elected to work around this by allowing a few very specific locations through. Similar things apply to the use of PulseAudio (to be fixed around Firefox 59 with a new Rust based audio backend), ffmpeg (media decoding must stay sandboxed) and WebGL.

We've made sure this works on all common, and many not-so common configurations. So most of you can stop reading here, but for those who like to know more details or are tinkerers, the following might be of interest. Due to the infinite configurability of Linux systems, it's always possible there will be cases where a non-standard setup can break things, and we've kept Firefox configurable, so you can at least help yourself, if you're so inclined.

For example, we know that in Firefox 57, allowing your system font configuration to search for fonts from the same directory as where your downloads are stored (a rather insecure configuration, for that matter!) can cause these fonts to appear blank in web-pages.

The following settings are available in about:config:

security.sandbox.content.level

This determines the strictness of the sandbox. 0 disables everything, 1 filters dangerous system calls, 2 additionally blocks writing to the filesystem, and 3 adds blocking of (most) reading from the filesystem. This is a high level knob, use it only to quickly check if an issue is caused by sandboxing. After changing this, you'll have to restart Firefox for it to take effect.

If lowering security.sandbox.level fixes your problems, turn it back to the default value (3 in Firefox 57) and restart Firefox with the MOZ_SANDBOX_LOGGING=1 environment variable set, which will log any accesses the Sandbox allows or blocks. "Denied" messages will give you a clue what is being blocked. Don't forget to file a bug in Bugzilla, so we can track the problem and if possible, make things work by default.

security.sandbox.content.read_path_whitelist

List of paths (directories and files) that Firefox is additionally allowed to read from, separated by commas. You can add things here if Firefox can't reach some libraries, config files or fonts that are in a non-standard location, but avoid pointing it to directories that contain personal information.

security.sandbox.content.write_path_whitelist

List of paths that Firefox is additionally allowed to write to, separated by commas. It should almost never be necessary to change this.

security.sandbox.content.syscall_whitelist

List of system call numbers that Firefox will additionally allow, separated by commas. A disallowed system call will crash Firefox with a message mentioning "seccomp violation". It should almost never be necessary to change this. We'd particularly like to hear from your in Bugzilla if you require this.

3 comments:

  1. Well, bookmark list disappeared, and I do hope no further damage are done, but faster it is...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Check here, they're most likely hidden or recoverable:
      https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recover-lost-or-missing-bookmarks

      Delete

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