25·
21 days agoJust the common “hate” talking points.
Because it’s more inconvenience than help for users who are average or above, and have no interest in using that technology.
If app developers start distributing binaries as flatpaks exclusively (examples of this already exist), then just extracting those binary packages alone is a chore (involving obscure(ish) steps starting with creating an empty ostree). It’s the kind of knowledge that is so useless you immediately erase it from your memory, which is what I did.
Also, one look at the dependency tree of flatpak, or even just ostree, and you quickly realize how much of a joke the “security” claims are with all that attack surface (think the xz in systemd drama and multiply it by a 100).
This is such a excellent unexpected original comeback, I will give you a chance to do another one.
How to extract the content of a flatpak
Which is something you presumably want to do because you don’t want to use
flatpak/ostree.The first step of course, is to install
ostree. 🤨Then, via this very official method:
ostree init --repo=repo --mode=bare-user ostree static-delta apply-offline --repo=repo some.flatpak ostree checkout --repo=repo -U $(basename $(echo repo/objects/*/*.commit | cut -d/ -f3- --output-delimiter= ) .commit) outdirThis official solution looks very reliable.
The impenetrable building blocks
Searching vulnerability databases will obviously prove futile. Like the below sample entries (search limited to CVSS>=9.0 and Age<90d)
[CVE-2025-7458] Critical - SQLite - Integer Overflow ↳ Priority: MEDIUM | No exploits | Vuln Age: 15d (RECENT) ↳ CVSS: 9.1 | EPSS: 0.0003 | KEV: ✘ ↳ Exposure: 12 | Vendors: sqlite | Products: sqlite ↳ Patch: ✔ | POCs: ✘ | Nuclei Template: ✘ | HackerOne: ✘ ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── [CVE-2025-6965] Critical - SQLite - Buffer Overflow ↳ Priority: HIGH | EXPLOITS AVAILABLE | Vuln Age: 29d (RECENT) ↳ CVSS: 9.8 | EPSS: 0.0005 | KEV: ✘ ↳ Exposure: 13 | Vendors: sqlite | Products: sqlite ↳ Patch: ✔ | POCs: 1 | Nuclei Template: ✘ | HackerOne: ✘ ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── [CVE-2025-49796] Critical - libxml2 - Denial of Service ↳ Priority: MEDIUM | No exploits | Vuln Age: 57d ↳ CVSS: 9.1 | EPSS: 0.0013 | KEV: ✘ ↳ Patch: ✘ | POCs: ✘ | Nuclei Template: ✘ | HackerOne: ✘ ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── [CVE-2025-49794] Critical - libxml2 - Use After Free ↳ Priority: MEDIUM | No exploits | Vuln Age: 57d ↳ CVSS: 9.1 | EPSS: 0.0013 | KEV: ✘ ↳ Patch: ✘ | POCs: ✘ | Nuclei Template: ✘ | HackerOne: ✘ ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── [CVE-2025-4517] Critical - Python tarfile - Path Traversal ↳ Priority: MEDIUM | No exploits | Vuln Age: 71d ↳ CVSS: 9.4 | EPSS: 0.0015 | KEV: ✘ ↳ Patch: ✘ | POCs: ✘ | Nuclei Template: ✘ | HackerOne: ✘ ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────libxml2andsqliteare in the dependency tree ofostreeitself of course. But really, nothing to see here.