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bubblewrap: Add --not-a-security-boundary flag to enable fail-open behavior#751

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bubblewrap: Add --not-a-security-boundary flag to enable fail-open behavior#751
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ao2:ao2/not-a-security-boundary

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@ao2 ao2 commented May 7, 2026

Some callers of bwrap (e.g. xdg-dbus-proxy, Steam Runtime) use it purely to adjust filesystem layout, without any expectation of a security boundary between the sandbox and the host.

For these callers, hard failures during sandbox setup (such as an automount timeout on a bind source) are unnecessarily fatal.

So add a new --not-a-security-boundary option that can be used to relax the bubblewrap behavior in these specific cases, and allow it to "fail-open".

…behavior

Some callers of bwrap (e.g. xdg-dbus-proxy, Steam Runtime) use it purely
to adjust filesystem layout, without any expectation of a security
boundary between the sandbox and the host.

For these callers, hard failures during sandbox setup (such as an
automount timeout on a bind source) are unnecessarily fatal.

So add a new `--not-a-security-boundary` option that can be used to
relax the bubblewrap behavior in these specific cases, and allow it to
"fail-open".

NOTE: The `failing_path` variable in setup_op_bind_mount() is annotated
with`cleanup_free` so that the allocation made by `bind_mount()` on the
error path is not leaked now that there is a non-fatal return path.

Signed-off-by: Antonio Ospite <antonio.ospite@collabora.com>
@ao2 ao2 changed the title bubblewrap: Add --not-a-security-boundary flag to enable fail-open … bubblewrap: Add --not-a-security-boundary flag to enable fail-open behavior May 7, 2026
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ao2 commented May 7, 2026

cc @smcv even though it's still a draft

Comment thread bubblewrap.c
Comment on lines +925 to +926
* Maybe we want to handle opt_not_a_security_boundary inside bind_mount
* itself?
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Yes, I think that would be a better place to do it.

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