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Because other processes can periodically check whether a predictable filename is in use, and guess things you'd rather keep private?


Why would you have processes you do not trust, or why not use firejail for those that may pose a security risk?

> Firejail is a SUID sandbox program that reduces the risk of security breaches by restricting the running environment of untrusted applications using Linux namespaces, seccomp-bpf and Linux capabilities. It allows a process and all its descendants to have their own private view of the globally shared kernel resources, such as the network stack, process table, mount table. Firejail can work in a SELinux or AppArmor environment, and it is integrated with Linux Control Groups.

It supports "--private" (mounts new /root and /home/user directories in temporary filesystems), along with "--private-{bin,cache,cwd,dev,etc,home,lib,opt,srv,tmp} (plus "noexec /tmp")". It also supports "keep-config-pulse", "keep-dev-shm", and so forth, meaning you can have shared files between process if you so wish (for DBus, etc.).


But you wouldn't need to guess names to do that, since the names of files in /tmp are publicly listable.




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