Motivation

The purpose of this tool is to open files from unknown sources without putting in danger the integrity of your system. Files are rendered through X11 mirroring from the Docker container to the host machine. Opened files are never opened in your environment and only have access to the mounted volumes / devices. The container does not have access to the internet. I chose Docker containers because they are fast, light, easy to build and have a great community that I trust about security.

The tool supports image, video, sound, pdf and text formats.

Setup

Make sure you have xhost and docker installed.

This command will open the current directory.

$ xhost +local:docker && \
  docker run  --volume $PWD:/app/data:ro \
              --volume /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
              --network none \
              --ipc host \
              --env DISPLAY=unix${DISPLAY} \
              --device /dev/snd \
              --device /dev/dri \
              lapwat/secure-open

To open another directory, replace $PWD with the absolute path you want to open into secure-open.

Remove ro option if you want to modify files mounted into the container.

What is working ?

File type	Renderer	Associated extensions
Image	feh	tif, tiff, bmp, png, jpg, jpeg, gif, ico
Video	mpv	mkv, mp4, webm, avi
Sound	mpg123	mp3
PDF	xpdf	pdf
Text	leafpad	txt

Unknown extensions will be opened as text files.

Do not hesitate to ask for support for more file types or extensions.