com.bitwarden.desktop VS network.loki.Session

> One thing I don't know about (which maybe somebody can inform me/us about): the wiki states that PRs are reviewed by Flathub reviewers, but I see no sign of human review on e.g. https://github.com/flathub/com.bitwarden.desktop/pull/167 (or others in that repo). What's the actual process?

In this case, I think the lack of human involvement is mostly a good thing. Flathub was criticised for having outdated packages[1]. Using automation to automatically update packages is mostly a good thing.

Obviously, we want to see thorough review of new packages, but that's a separate issue.

[1] I thought I read this in an LWN article, but I can't find it. But see e.g. https://github.com/flathub/org.qutebrowser.qutebrowser/issue...

for example, bitwarden's flatpak on github shows basically just repackages the official debian build into a flatpak build. in this case i think it's pretty safe (in fact i use the flatpak).

You might also be interested in learning a little about Flatpaks and downloading/installing programs from Flathub. I'll give you the basic background: It's an alternative (in some ways, honestly, modern) way of installing programs that can be sandboxed/permissioned. It's a way of releasing software that also helps ensure compatibility across a wide variety of systems. It's also a way of releasing software that can update independently from the base installation. You can think of it sort of like an app store on a phone where the programs are a bit self-contained and can update independently from the phone's operating system. https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.bitwarden.desktop

See https://github.com/flathub/com.bitwarden.desktop/issues/63

Example of an application but with Electron: https://github.com/flathub/com.bitwarden.desktop

Since we're on the subject, you can also host your own BitWarden if you wanted. Bitwarden also has a desktop client for Linux as well. Alternatively if enabled 3rd Party Repositories or just manually enabled Flathub, you can install the Bitwarden flatpak.

It's not really that much of a risk. If you look at the yaml file you can see exactly what permissions it requests and what happens when the package is built.

Luckily, Flathub is transparent in what manifests are used in the production of the Flatpaks they host. For example, this is the one for Bitwarden. You can take some time to learn how Flatpaks are built, but this one seems pretty straight forward. They are taking the .deb file from Bitwarden's github release page and extracting the executable from there. Then it adds a couple extra files, which are viewable within the manifest file, to make it into a Flatpak app.

The manifest is building sources rather than unpacking binaries built elsewhere. It is pretty difficult to know what sources prepackaged binaries are built from, they could in theory contain malware. Session is downloading a deb package and unpacking that, is the deb file built from the sources we see in the repo and can we know that?