Canonical is adding some much-needed improvements to Snaps’ permission in Ubuntu 24.10, adding permission prompts to give users more control over Snaps.

Snaps are containerized apps Canonical has pioneered in an effort to solve the complexity surrounding traditional Linux packages. Snaps, like competing Flatpaks, have all their dependencies in a self-contained package, rather than relying on the system’s libraries. As a result, Snaps provide a way to have the latest applications, even on older Linux distros. In addition, Snaps provide a measure of sandboxing, because the app is self-contained.

Listen to a podcast conversation on Ubuntu 24.10, and it’s new experimental feature!

In an effort to improve Snaps’ sandboxing and security, Ubuntu 24.10 will introduce permission prompts, as described by Oliver Smith, Interim Engineering Director for Ubuntu Desktop.

Hi folks! As a bonus update ahead of the main September post I want to switch things up a bit and introduce you to an experimental new feature landing in the Ubuntu 24.10 dailies soon.

Permissions prompting is a critical tool for privacy and security conscious users to control, manage and understand the behaviour of applications running on their machine. This implementation represents a significant step forward in application security, and distinguishes itself from traditional XDG Desktop Portals by enabling fine-grained access control over unmodified binaries without requiring changes to the application code. By leveraging Ubuntu’s AppArmor implementation, prompting enforces sandboxing and mediates access at the system call level to ensure that every action is tightly controlled and subject to user consent, even for applications that are entirely unaware of this mediation.

The snapd, security and desktop teams at Canonical have collaborated closely over a number of years to bring this feature to life and we’re excited to deliver an initial opt-in implementation to Ubuntu 24.10 focussed on home interface permissions so that we can refine the experience based on your feedback.

Smith emphasizes that the permissions prompting is a work in progress, but new features and abilities will be added.

In this release the Security Center is the home for managing your prompt rules, over time we will expand its functionality to cover additional security-related settings for your desktop such as encryption management and firewall control.

As always, the demo above represents a work in progress, with further UI improvements still to land over the next few weeks ahead of release (and beyond). This implementation, as an opt-in feature, is designed to surface as much information to the user as possible regarding what actions the application is attempting to perform, what permissions you will be granting and their duration. We expect this to be iterated over based on user feedback.

Permission prompting is a welcome improvement for Snaps and will help managing them much easier, while improving the security and stability of Ubuntu.