Electron app: "SUID sandbox helper binary was found, but is not configured correctly"

Question

I had the same issue recently after attempting to start another Electron-based app (particl-desktop), and I was able to manually fix it by running:

sudo chown root chrome-sandbox
chmod 4755 chrome-sandbox

This enabled me to successfully start the package mentioned above. However, before doing the same thing again, I want to know why this is happening and whether there is a more permanent fix in case this keeps happening.

I've read that alternatively these apps can be launched with the --no-sandbox flag. But is it safe to do this?

Distribution

Debian 10 (Buster)

Issue

atom &
/usr/bin/atom: line 190: 27367 Trace/breakpoint trap   nohup "$ATOM_PATH" --executed-from="$(pwd)" --pid=$$ "$@" > "$ATOM_HOME/nohup.out" 2>&1
[27367:0520/072821.694231:FATAL:setuid_sandbox_host.cc(157)] The SUID sandbox helper binary was found, but is not configured correctly. Rather than run without sandboxing I'm aborting now. You need to make sure that /usr/share/atom/chrome-sandbox is owned by root and has mode 4755.

Further information

uname -a
Linux debian 4.19.0-9-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.19.118-2 (2020-04-29) x86_64 GNU/Linux

journalctl
May 20 07:28:21 debian kernel: traps: atom[27367] trap int3 ip:560ceaee7627 sp:7ffdfd684ad0 error:0 in atom[560ce8fc3000+5024000]

sudo dpkg -l | grep atom
ii  atom                                   1.47.0                               amd64        A hackable text editor for the 21st Century.

Solution

I had this same problem when I updated to version 1.47.0. As you mentioned you could remove sandboxing, but a better fix for the time being would be to just downgrade to the previous version.

This shows all of the versions you can downgrade to (you should probably pick v1.46.0):

sudo apt-cache policy atom

After just run:

sudo apt install atom=1.46.0

Btw this assumes that you have atom repo in you sources.list.d directory. You can check with:

cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d
ls

You should then see atom.list. If you don't, see installing atom