I have my firewall configured pretty restrictively. I am attempting to configure AppArmor but it seems to complicated.
How do you secure your desktop?
I have my firewall configured pretty restrictively. I am attempting to configure AppArmor but it seems to complicated.
How do you secure your desktop?
Of course, but it’s too long - it will take a while to apply go through it all and understand them. I’m looking for more practical things I can get done now.
This page is really to help you defining what would be of concern for you. There are too many use cases and security measures will differ greatly. It is not a step by step guide.
At the very minimum, since your firewall is already setup, just make sure to keep your firmware up to date with fwupd if your machine supports it and follow the basic good practice below:
If you need AppArmor as you mentioned. You should really invest efforts into it. ArchLinux is by nature a demanding distro for its setup. That being said once installed and activated (i.e. litterally 2 commands to run) you should be good to go unless you want to setup additional profiles.
Once you figured out how to meet your own security needs, you can start the same lengthy process to address your privacy needs ;)
I am confused about whether I need AppArmor. It’s been installed without configuration for a while now (i.e. in useless form). I’ve come across a project that aims to use it to implement a security model like Android’s. I’ve enforced all their profiles (I needed to unbreak my system by moving some to complain later but better than nothing, I guess). Do I need firejail on top of this? It seems like it’s more for launching untrusted applications and I don’t launch them in the first place.
If you don’t use untrusted applications, you don’t need firejail.
Similarly if you don’t need know what Apparmor is used for, just don’t use it. It’s not mandatory and you will take the risky move by not configuring it correctly. Never follow any step by step process based on a shiny title if you don’t fully understand what you’re doing and why you’d need to go that route in the first place.
Arch is pretty stable and secure with the minimum configuration, especially for “regular” users (no negative meaning here, I’m one of them).
Not sure about this one. AFAIU, AppArmor cannot grant permissions not granted by DAC meaning that an incorrect configuration, at worst, will not do anything useful. I’m not seeing the risk here.
Can you elaborate on how Arch is secure against things like: me unknowingly running an untrusted program or an AUR package being compromised? Sandboxing, AppArmor, or an AV will not necessarily block all harm from these type of events, but at least they provide some form of mitigation.
If there may be no risk in using Apparmor misconfigured, it’s still useless and not a good practice to use apps this way. Overall, this was more a general advice because other apps may have more negative effects when not properly configured. It’s good to set up good habits from the start and stick to them.
I’ve built my answer based on the use-case you exposed (i.e. not using untrusted packages). As I said, if you are now planning on using untrusted packages, you should configure your system appropriately.
Re: AUR, it’s quite safe. In theory it can be harmful but only if the user is not careful. You should always inspect PKGBUILDs and *.install files when building packages from the AUR (the pacman wrapper you use to download from AUR should have a dialogue which prompts you to do this). I have personally never experienced any troubles using packages from AUR (and I have quite some) because the community is usually pretty vigilant but also because I use only packages maintained for long time by known developers.
Hope this helps. You can learn more by reading the arch wiki (which is recognized to be the best one so use it at your advantage) and by doing simple searches on the arch forum. Both resources were dramatically helpful to me understanding what arch is, how it works, and what to expect when I started using it 15 years ago.
But that’s the nature of the beast. Unless one defines their threat model[1], there’s an ever-expanding list of improvements one might apply to enhance security; with -at some point- (mostly) diminishing returns and we’ve yet to talk about the amount of comfort that’s sacrificed along the way. Therefore, before you do anything else, define your threat model. Afterwards, try to apply step-by-step whatever is required to protect your assets to a degree you’re comfortable with[2]. If, however, this seems like too much work for you, then consider either one of the following: