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Less is safer: How Obsidian reduces the risk of supply chain attacks

(obsidian.md)
421 points saeedesmaili | 1 comments | 19 Sep 25 22:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.409s | source
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gejose ◴[19 Sep 25 23:42 UTC] No.45308131[source]▶
This is one way to look at it, but ignores the fact that most users use third party community plugins.

Obsidian has a truly terrible security model for plugins. As I realized while building my own, Obsidian plugins have full, unrestricted access to all files in the vault.

Obsidian could've instead opted to be more 'batteries-included', at the cost of more development effort, but instead leaves this to the community, which in turn increases the attack surface significantly.

Or it could have a browser extension like manifest that declares all permissions used by the plugin, where attempting to access a permission that's not granted gets blocked.

Both of these approaches would've led to more real security to end users than "we have few third party dependencies".

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ibash ◴[20 Sep 25 03:58 UTC] No.45310219[source]▶
> Obsidian plugins have full, unrestricted access to all files in the vault.

Unless something has changed, it's worse than that. Plugins have unrestricted access to any file on your machine.

When I brought this up in discord a while back they brushed it aside.

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1. Tallain ◴[20 Sep 25 06:11 UTC] No.45310878[source]▶
Having recently read through a handful of issues on their forums, they seems to brush aside a lot of things. It's a useful tool but the mod / dev team they have working with the community could use some training.