For Ubuntu 22.04 (“Jammy”), Fedora 35, and other distros with with newer versions of glibc (>= 2.34) the RStudio Desktop application now disables the Chromium security sandbox in order to workaround a library conflict between the version of chromium used in Qt 5.12 and the platform libraries. The sandbox is a second level security mechanism that prevents untrusted Javascript code from exploiting unknown security problems from using a set of protected system services.
While we will continue to support the Chromium security sandbox for other versions of Linux and in our upcoming Electron version on all platforms, we believe the product security for RStudio Desktop on Ubuntu 22.04 and Fedora 35 will not be significantly affected even with this security feature disabled. Software security is not a perfect science so we want to be clear about the implications so users can make informed choices.
RStudio Desktop is a developer’s tool that commonly runs custom code outside of the browser sandbox. Users already must take care to trust the code they run, and are protected by the language and library interfaces they use, as well as a trusted supply chain of package managers. RStudio Desktop either accesses all files on the local system, or connects through an explicit process to trusted servers.
See https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/0e94f26e8/docs/linux_sandboxing.md#the-sandbox-1 for more details.
