This Week in GNOME: #170 Portal Updates
Quoting: #170 Portal Updates · This Week in GNOME —
The development version of Flatpak has received support for listing enumerable and blocked USB devices. This is the first step towards a fully featured USB portal, which is in the works.
Flatpak itself doesn’t expose nor blocks USB devices, but it provides the metadata for the USB portal to allow or deny an app’s access to particular devices.
With this mechanism, apps can request access to devices without opening holes in the sandbox (in this case, the sandbox hole is quite big; apps that access USB devices need to give access to all devices on the system).
In addition to that, app store reviewers can review ahead of time which USB permissions the apps will be requesting, which may add an extra layer of security and trust to Flatpak-based app stores like Flathub.
This work was only made possible thanks to Sovereign Tech Fund, various community members that helped reviewing and shaping up the feature, and Hub for pushing it to the finish line!