Mounting thumbnails to tmpfs

VirtualBox
1

Thumbnails are turned off by default in Workstation. Would it be a good idea to mount all thumbnails to a tmpfs directory stored in RAM? Thumbnails rarely add up in significant size - I’ve generated up to 10,000 before and it barely took 1 GB. Would an entry in fstab like the following be ideal, or are there security risks in doing so?:

none /home/[username]/.thumbnails tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,size=20%,uid=1000,gid=1000,mode=0755 0 0
none /home/[username]/.cache/thumbnails tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,size=20%,uid=1000,gid=1000,mode=0755 0 0

2

That’s for security reasons. Less attack surface. It’s not for the purpose of saving disk space.

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3

I’m not concerned about saving space. I’m asking for the sake of the convenience of thumbnails. Would having thumbnails mounted to a tmpfs directory give less attack surface than having them normally, or does it make no difference?

4

No difference.

The code that parses the thumbnails (file manager) is already running. If it can be exploited by crafted images then it turns malicious. So noexec and tmpfs likely aren’t helpful.

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