Allowing unprivileged users to just arbitrarily mount file systems is hence a security issue on many levels.
With v256 we are opening this up nonetheless – within limits. Specifically, there's now a small IPC interface where clients can pass an fd to a disk image file to, and get back a mount fd they can attach to a location in the file system. To lock this down securely, a couple of requirements are enforced however.
Primarily this means: the DDI *must* come with valid dm-verity data and a signature recognized by the system's keyring (well, if this is missing a polkit authorization is attempted – the user might possibly allow this anyway, if polkit is letting them). And the client must also pass in a user namespace fd (which cannot be the system's main one) to which the mount is restricted.