Certainly an interesting vulnerability, but one you shouldn’t worry about.
If you do really care about sandbox security, the first thing I would recommend doing is globally blocking filesystem access to anywhere in your $HOME that runs script code, such as:
- bash files like ~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_profile
- ~/.local/bin and ~/bin
- ~/.ssh
I have a script that I use to control flatpak overrides and I do something like this:
# paths to block GLOBAL_RESTRICTION_PATHS=( "~/.bash_logout" "~/.bash_profile" "~/.bashrc" "~/.profile" "~/.ssh" "~/.zshenv" "xdg-config/zsh" "~/.local/bin" "xdg-config/systemd" ) # globally block these paths for path in "${GLOBAL_RESTRICTION_PATHS[@]}"; do flatpak --user override --nofilesystem="$path" done # but allow some apps like text editors to access them for path in "${GLOBAL_RESTRICTION_PATHS[@]}"; do flatpak --user override --filesystem="$path" org.gnome.TextEditor doneWondering why they stopped replying. One would imagine they would have a strong and well defined process for security reports, but it just seems like they sad “meh”
KDE has a history of doing that. Plasma widgets are a gaping security hole. You can poke a hole through root. I’m pretty sure you can traverse up the JS object hierarchy from a widget and modify the whole desktop in anyway you want. At least at some point this was possible. A widget can and has deadlocked plasmashell from even loading. Their response was basically “works as intended” and closed the issue.
Plasma widgets are a gaping security hole.
Aka “thing that isn’t sandboxed, never has been sandboxed, and never has been claimed to be sandboxed, is in fact not sandboxed”. Just like any app from your distro repositories, or appimages, or games in Steam… Or even most Flatpaks by default for that matter.
Widgets being sandboxed would be cool and is a long term goal (which is way easier said than done!), but don’t present them not being sandboxed as some irresponsible thing someone does because they don’t care. Your expectations of security simply are simply completely misplaced.


