This is why we need sandboxing. Right now the Linux desktop is still lacking in terms of security
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
76 points (100.0% liked)
KDE
6319 readers
1 users here now
KDE is an international technology team creating user-friendly free and open source software for desktop and portable computing. KDE’s software runs on GNU/Linux, BSD and other operating systems, including Windows.
Plasma 6 Bugs
If you encounter a bug, proceed to https://bugs.kde.org/, check whether it has been reported.
If it hasn't, report it yourself.
PLEASE THINK CAREFULLY BEFORE POSTING HERE.
Developers do not look for reports on social media, so they will not see it and all it does is clutter up the feed.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
@possiblylinux127 @wisha And how would sandboxing a malicious script inside a theme that is supposed to change the look of your desktop work? They installed and ran something that rm'd their home directory. I'm honestly curious how you'd solve this.
A more locked-down theming API could help. For example Firefox themes are always 100% safe to install. That said, Firefox themes are almost useless (they’re more like color schemes lol), and no one wants to lose KDE’s powerful customizability so 🤷🤷
What do you mean? I have Firefox themes that change the whole look of the browser, using userchrome.css.
That's obviously not what OP was referring to when mentioning "Firefox themes".
Maybe, I was showing that there were better ways to theme Firefox though
Perhaps having different categories with different limitations would work well. Using the firefox example, prioritize the use of WebExtensions, but keep XUL/XPCOM with appropriate warnings.
If it ran in a sandbox it would just wipe its own files instead of the system. Under no circumstances should a plugin from some random guy online be running with such high privileges
@possiblylinux127 I was asking how you’d run something that modded the whole UI … sandboxed.
You would need to expose some sort of hook that allows modifications
SELinux? Apparmor? (Serious question, I don't know if there might be features that render those two inadequate)
Great time to mention tools like testdisk that can easily recover data that has been recently deleted on common filesystems.
Not malicious. Just buggy -- a downright nasty bug, but a bug.
I thought wayland was supposed to improve security. Were the past 18 years a lie?
Uhm, Wayland improves security but its just one component. Will a bash script work the same on Wayland as on XOrg? Yes.
You must have heard that old chestnut about how "the weakest security link in the security chain is the user" by now. There is nothing any technology can do if the user decides to install insecure stuff. Even before today, the KDE Store prominently displayed warnings about being careful with the content.
Extensions need to follow standards, and be installed as non-executable files in defined categories.
Everything else has to be removed or behind a huge warning.
That is not possible. widgets and Global themes have to be able to execute code to work.
By the way: the code was not malicious, just badly written.
Why do global themes need to do that? Arent they just color and image files, maybe audio?
It doesnt really matter if the code was malicious or not, this should not be possible.
Another example of how damn insecure linux is. Just because its not the snap store, we dont have tons of malicious addons on pling.
That is regular themes.
_Global_ themes also modify the desktop's behavior and hence contain code to do that.
Reading the comments, looks like bad/old code mixed with a big update rather than anything malicious. I even ran into themes that killed my KDE last night. Had to purge the configs themes to get it working. Damn glad I didn't wipe my entire setup.
Correct. The theme creator missed a variable that is not part of the Plasma environment anymore, and instead of running
rm -Rf [something]
it run
rm -Rf
😬