netblue30/firejailLinux namespaces and seccomp-bpf sandbox
Firejail is a lightweight security tool intended to protect a Linux system by setting up a restricted environment for running (potentially untrusted) applications.
More specifically, it is an SUID sandbox program that reduces the risk of security breaches by using Linux namespaces, seccomp-bpf and Linux capabilities. 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 and mount table. Firejail can work in an SELinux or AppArmor environment, and it is integrated with Linux Control Groups.
Written in C with virtually no dependencies, the software runs on any Linux computer with a 3.x kernel version or newer. It can sandbox any type of processes: servers, graphical applications, and even user login sessions. The software includes sandbox profiles for a number of more common Linux programs, such as Mozilla Firefox, Chromium, VLC, Transmission etc.
The sandbox is lightweight, the overhead is low. There are no complicated configuration files to edit, no socket connections open, no daemons running in the background. All security features are implemented directly in Linux kernel and available on any Linux computer.
Quick Start |
Advanced Browser Security |
Tor Browser Security |
See SECURITY.md.
For the supported versions, see SECURITY.md.
Note: The versions from Debian stable and backports are likely to be outdated, so currently we recommend either downloading and installing the .deb package from the latest release:
Debian stable (bullseye): We recommend to use the backports package.
Note: The versions from the distribution and PPA are likely to be outdated, so currently we recommend either downloading and installing the .deb package from the latest release:
Note: The PPA recommendation is mainly for firejail itself; it should be fine to install firetools and firejail-related tools directly from the distribution if they are not in the PPA as they tend to be updated less frequently.
For Ubuntu 18.04+ and derivatives (such as Linux Mint), users are strongly advised to use the PPA.
How to add and install from the PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deki/firejail
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firejail firejail-profiles
Reason: The firejail package for Ubuntu 20.04 has been left vulnerable to CVE-2021-26910 for months after a patch for it was posted on Launchpad:
See also https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/FAQ:
What software is supported by the Ubuntu Security team?
Ubuntu is currently divided into four components: main, restricted, universe and multiverse. All binary packages in main and restricted are supported by the Ubuntu Security team for the life of an Ubuntu release, while binary packages in universe and multiverse are supported by the Ubuntu community.
Additionally, the PPA version is likely to be more recent and to contain more profile fixes.
See the following discussions for details:
Firejail is available in multiple Linux distributions:
Other than the aforementioned exceptions, as long as your distribution provides a supported version of firejail, it's generally a good idea to install it from the distribution.
The version can be checked with firejail --version after installing.