I have a hard time understanding the benefits of the keyring (e.g. GNOME keyring). I get the convenience parts - I don’t have to enter password for something every time I want to use it (e.g. mounted encrypted drive) and I don’t have to create a secret for some background stuff (applications keys). But the problem is, if I understand it correctly, that every application has the same access to my keyring, so, in theory, a malicious application can just read my Signal key and they can just read all my Signal messages right? Is there a point, then, in encrypting e.g. local database (like Signal) if the key to that database is readily available anyway? Any input is welcome. thanks!


Thanks for the summary, a few more questions if its ok: What do you mean by untrusted apps? Is it untrusted by system (by what mechanism) or by some central entity? Container apps, you mean flatpaks? And they get selective access, like there is some space for all flatpaks that is separated, or there is actually one space per app and they don’t see anything else?
This has more details: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeKeyring/SecurityFAQ
This seems to be out of date, and there is no info in the GNOME Project handbook… Maybe its still valid?