Defend your desktop with Firejail

The recent attacks against computers using Firefox were a bit worrying. Apart from using the excellent Firefox addons like uBlock origin and uMatrix to block lots of ads and javascript, you can do more : Install Firejail and the Firetools GUI to prevent access to most of your files. For Firefox browser the Firejail tool actually fills a gap since there is no good Firefox profile to be used by default with Apparmor. Installing Firejail and Firetools is easy on Debian and Arch Linux based installs.

Debian : $ sudo apt -y install firejail firetools

Arch : $ sudo pacman -S firejail firetools

After that is done, start the Firetools app, shut down your running Firefox instance, and then fire it up from the Firetools app. To check if it does its job, type in the Firefox address bar :

file:///

Then browse into your home directory. If all is well it should only list your Downloads directory.

Happy browsing ! :)

Firejail homepage

Firejail on Github

Arch linux wiki on Firejail

Two interesting articles on Firejail :

Introduction To Firejail, AppArmor, and SELinux

Sandbox your applications with Firejail

Image source : "Source code security plugin" by Christiaan Colen is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0